TRANSLATION AND THE WONDER OF SELF-CORROBORATIVE TEXT

I’m very sure that most of us have read any number of fatuous comments online – especially on social media sites – that are little more than anything along the lines of, “This song is so cool / wack!” or “This idea is so funny!” or “I did this today, and I thought it was really [insert any single adjective here].” Sure, we’ve all heard of the right to free speech – and maybe there are times when those who make such comments do so with a level of sincerity which they know is particularly high – but when you think about it, whenever someone makes such a statement, it is pretty much always going to be a whole lot more informative to them and them only, than to anyone else, at any point in the future. I am quick to dismiss such comments as soon as I read them (and would suggest that most people are). Is it worth me asking why they are so common? When such a comment is read by anyone other than its author by chance, they can only guess as to what is really lying behind the words that they read – these words do not speak for themselves; they are not self-corroborative. I will discuss this idea in what follows.

I think we would all agree that self-corroborative statements are rare among people who are a bit slow when they speak: people who, for example, are, like, prone to, like, saying, like, “like”, like, several times per, like, sentence; and this, like, makes it, like, hard to like, follow what they’re, like, saying. Maybe that’s exaggerated. Either way, I view it as hard to dispute that comments like that are anything but that which is known as laconic speech, something which the Spartans placed a lot of importance on. And laconic speech tends to be self-corroborative in my opinion.
Of course, this is another business comment of mine, and for that reason I want to relate the whole idea of self-corroborative text to translation at some point. When I say I care about producing “good” translations, this means translations that are clear and accurate, and which people can feel confident about as they read them. Need I say more? (You tell me.) With that said: I think of the alleged “art of explanation” (see my comment dated 19th July 2013) as something that I connect with the idea of self-corroborative text. Ditto for that time I suggested that one of the reasons why Rebecca Black’s song Friday is so unpopular is how plain inane and hopelessly abstract it is, including the suggestion of how it depends on its video to explain what it is about (see my comment dated 5th June 2013). But, to talk translation: people respond to examples of bad translations in different ways. Some are enough to appal anyone depending on the situation, while others amuse people even if it wouldn’t be fair to call them chaotically inaccurate (in one or more ways). And, some bad translations, while linguistically sound and everything, may ultimately prove inadequate if they fail to furnish the reader with enough “guidance” as to their subject matter – if they only really exist merely as collections of words which definitely exist to say one thing and one thing only but which just leave too much to the imagination of the reader.

I was pleased that I could remember the name of this guy, who was, paradoxically, frustrating and endearing and amusing all at once before his actual performance. If I’m not mistaken, someone once said that they reminded him or her of Forrest Gump. To tell you the truth, it was the fact that I found myself thinking of this guy at some point very recently that eventually encouraged me to write this entire comment. After all, a situation, incident, opinion or anything else is what it is / will be – but it won’t be entirely responsible for individuals’ reports of, responses to and memories about it (indeed, “History is not what happened in the past. History is what we think happened in the past.”). That is something I insist. Such is the wonder of self-corroborative text.

 

All things considered, it does seem to me that people who are to some degree adept at using self-corroborative / laconic communication would be more confident at translating than those who are not. Can you remember a time when you were trying to explain something to someone else and it was hard enough that you wish you had a pencil and paper on hand to help you do it but didn’t? I don’t think that such a scenario is that uncommon. There is an extent to how far confidence is not necessary for mustering good translation. For example, good translators know that there are times when the most reliable (and, sometimes, ironically, the easiest) thing to do when translating a given sentence or phrase is to use a whole new grammatical construction and / or some completely different lexical items in their reproduction of what they have understood is the intended message contained in the source language, in the new language. In short, this kind of confidence depends on inventiveness and flexible thinking for its survival. Especially when you consider such issues as the fact that there are some words in a given language whose meanings can vary in another. …I may be the one writing all this stuff but one thing has not changed: any barriers between me and attaining the status of “perfect translator” are as likely to be consequential of my own knowledge gaps as anything else. Of course, I am well aware of all these would-be entrepreneur translators on online forums like ProZ who are notorious for producing poor quality translations – on the ProZ discussion board, people keep lamenting about how it is obvious that these people put too much faith machine translators to do their work, with inferior translation product as a consequence (having said that, sometimes these people falsely represent genuine translation agencies, presumably for the sake of enhancing their credibility, which is not a good thing). Needless to say, whatever machine translators are good for, there’s no merit to be found in the so-called confidence that these would-be entrepreneur translators enjoy thanks purely to the existence of these machine translators that are so easily and readily available to them.

If I had to attempt a definition of self-corroborative text, it would be: the kind of text which can in and of itself be interpreted as directly relevant to some given subject in particular while making a particular point which has at least some element of unquestionable certainty in it; no “add-ons” (by the speaker or the listener) are required in order to specifically clarify the same. Maybe it would be fitting to describe it thus: text which, in and of itself, has something about it which, in some way, definitely reflects something a priori even if it would also indicate something a posteriori.
This is the point where I evaluate. Taking stuff for granted is something we are all familiar with, and for pretty much the same reason: no-one likes to feel that they are / should be concerned about something to excess, especially when it is known for certain (or close enough) what the outcome of the thing will be or would be. I of course make a point of not taking stuff for granted in my work as a self-employed translator – in the interests of common sense as much as “professionalism”. But there just must have been times when people have taken something for granted while having incorrect ideas about what the thing in question actually is, if that makes sense…

What if I were to suggest that common sense most frequently starts with proper and adept communication? Is that right or wrong?