THERE’S NO REJECTION OF PLATITUDES LIKE A TRANSLATOR’S REJECTION OF PLATITUDES
I’m going to start this comment by saying something I forgot to add in my comment about self-corroborative text. I used to play a certain fantasy gamebook (wizards, elves and all that) in which, depending on the decisions you make when you play it, you might end up somewhere where you come across a document written in “the dwarfish tongue”. One of the characters you can play is a dwarf, who can read it, but if you’re playing as the wizard you can “spend one Magic Point” to translate it into… well, not a language that actually exists, but the language that the wizard character usually reads and uses; and when you agree to spend one Magic Point for this you turn to a certain paragraph in the book where it is then explained to you, the player, in a language you know or else you wouldn’t be playing the gamebook in the first place. Anyway, it didn’t take much for me to accept that some people seem to think that machine translation software can be trusted to “magically” produce fitting translations just like it is done magically in this gamebook in the scenario above, when this is simply not the case. In my comment about self-corroborative text I mentioned that this is something done by people who call themselves translators, and that they are notorious on the likes of the ProZ discussion forums for producing poor translation work. Personally, I feel sad that they do this – and not just because of the suffering of the poor people that they do such “work” for.
However, while I intend to talk about translation / the art thereof in this comment – like I already have done in many other comments, I suppose – it goes beyond merely that. I can promise you that.
I think I long ago proved to everyone that my English is good enough for me to be translating into it for a living. I know quite a few aspects of proper English that most people don’t care about and who ignore them when they hear them being discussed. I’m not talking about common embarrassing mistakes like “I should of” or “Your very funny”. What I mean is I know when to use “fewer” rather than “less”, and know about comma splicing – things like that. However, even if I spoke the Queen’s English and my peers openly agreed that I did, I really don’t think that I could use that as a defensive argument against anyone who would claim that, when I said something in English, I had no idea what I was talking about.
If you know very little about a given subject, it’s hardly unlikely that, when you talk about it, you will do so in an unrelaxed manner, with the frequent use of awkward and vague expressions, until the point where it effectively becomes a habit. That’s exactly what I’m talking about by “a translator’s rejection of platitudes” in the title. And everyone knows that sometimes when a translator is called upon to translate something, they are expected to have an actual knowledge of the subject matter. I must confess that “an actual knowledge of the subject matter” is probably a tough expression to get an easy grip on. After all, there are plenty of subjects with their own terminology and set expressions: legal, technical fields, music, certain games, you name it. But I usually find that, when I translate something, it pays to ruminate, say, the actual intentions of certain people out there (who I likely don’t know and am indifferent toward) that are reflected in the original document, which can only be acknowledged when the original document is… well, read carefully.
Not that long ago, I learned of this young American polyglot called Tim Doner, who speaks many languages in this video
I have much to say about him, and I hope this comment is not going to end up sounding like it has started being only about him. If I want to write a comment specifically about him, I’ll let you know at the beginning; just so you know. He speaks a few languages even I hadn’t heard of. I watched the video twice, but paid special attention to when he was speaking French and German, mainly because those are the only foreign languages I can speak at any sort of respectable level. (But I know I could learn another! )Yes, it’s impressive. I couldn’t tell you whether or not he had it all scripted beforehand, but I could believe that he didn’t i.e. that he made it all up as he went along. I agree that he speaks many of the foreign languages he knows not quite “fluently” but certainly at a conversational level which is notably higher than rudimentary. Myself, I was quick to note that, for example, he uses the “ne… que” construction in the French bit, and the “weder… noch” construction in the German bit. And when he says “I teach myself German” he says it as “Ich bringe mir selbst Deutsch bei”, and I would never have thought of that, preferring to use something decidedly less idiomatic, like “Ich unterrichte mir selbst Deutsch”. But I’m not going to talk about what he can do only in terms of certain aspects of the foreign languages themselves. With Hebrew he says, “I am comfortable when I have to talk to someone or explain something”. With German he says, “This language is very popular in the polyglot community”, which indicates that, to some extent, he definitely does more than sit in his room teaching himself this language or that language with a few materials while just not caring about that language’s actual place and role in society, however talented or committed he may be about learning the language in his own eyes. It is clear that he can comfortably talk about far more than himself and his own life in many of the foreign languages he knows. Well done him. …And that’s my elaboration of “Yes, it’s impressive”, with more than one case in point and discussion thereof, in case it sounded like a “platitude” thing to say. Who saw that coming?
He’s heard of a Yiddish proverb that goes: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Whatever that means; though to me it merely reminds me that a “language” has a higher status than a dialect, which everyone knows. Also, at one point he says, “Sometimes in my head, Turkish, Arabic and Farsi become one language.” I don’t speak any of those languages, but I imagine that if I asked to him to explain what he meant by that, he would feel very awkward about it even if I spoke all three, and even if he had something like a pencil and paper to help him. Like I said, there’s no rejection of platitudes like a translator’s rejection of platitudes.
Tim says a few things which I consider “platitude-sounding” in his video (“I want to go to Russia because I like travelling and clearly, I need practice”, “I’m learning Pashto because Afghanistan has a special place in the world”), but I don’t want to be too hard on him because sometimes they can be tacitly accepted by anyone – it’s not like I absolutely never say anything like “platitude-sounding” myself.
All in all, though, I go out of my way to avoid this so-called “platitude speech attitude” too much because I think it’s important as far as my work concerned. Do you want to know what I mean by that? Good, because I was going to explain it anyway. For someone writing this in a cosy study with the curtains closed, separated from the world, I would suggest that there are certain professions where people decide against platitudes in communication too much – whether they realise it or not – because, put simply, they would just know that it “just does not help”, even if they could not explain why. Think of that one when you next watch a detective or a teacher at work. Or if you are trying to sell something, or you are in a job interview – the product or service / you could be one of the best “things” in the business but if you’re not specific enough the person you’re talking to will probably get as frustrated trying to listening to and understand you as you will be trying to persuade them how good the “thing” is, and then it all falls apart. And I too prefer to say more than platitude expressions when writing my translations lest they undermine the confidence of the client or potential reader, whether or not they had it in them to say so.