SPECULATIVE REFLECTION ON ONE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH LANGUAGE FROM A PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATOR (AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR ME PERSONALLY)
To those who live a plain existence which is not necessarily as satisfying as they like to pretend, their appreciation of the language they were taught from their earliest days is unlikely to extend too far beyond recognition of terms / individual words as labels for individual things, precisely because “well, that’s how it should be”. But we’re not stupid, are we? People have pointed out anecdotal facts about individual languages which they can’t do anything about and which are there to stay – I’m sure the age of the Internet has made society as a whole more aware of this phenomenon than ever. In the case of English – my own mother tongue – I wasn’t the one who thought of how the word “fish” could be spelled “ghoti”, for example. I wasn’t the first to observe that the sequence of letters “ough” sounds very different in words like “through”, “tough”, “cough”, “bough” and “bought”.
Of course, the content of these blogs I write for the purpose of promoting myself as a professional translator, is not limited to bringing up things like this; after all, in my eyes, it is to be understood as something that anyone could just end up doing, and I don’t want to sell myself short here.
That’s not to say that, during my time at school and university, my teachers and lecturers never referenced such anecdotes – which, without wishing to sound rude, would likely be appreciated by anyone who wasn’t there to study as the things most likely to retain their attention – in connection with whatever they were talking about at the time. It’s easy to pay attention to what you understand compared to what you don’t understand – but if you ask me, both tend to be easier than paying attention to what you once thought you understood.
The paradoxical truth is that, for all the good reasons I may have to call myself an “authority” on language and linguistics given my position as a successful translator who does it for a living (seven years of experience or not), it is just not my position to say what the precise meaning of any given term “should” or “shouldn’t” be; and if I have ever “sort of felt the need to do this” in the past, then I have tried to do it with some sort of tacit justification in the translation text that I am producing itself i.e. a supporting argument which speaks for itself. The thing is, I always have to make language-related decisions in what I do; of course I do. So it shouldn’t be hard to believe that I have sharp acumen for false translation.
Compare false translation with plagiarism, or talking in clichés and PBAs (see an earlier comment I wrote on 14th June 2015 which explains what a “precedent-based assertion” is, in the last big paragraph). People have done all three of the latter in the far simpler act of everyday conversation, and who’s to say that it doesn’t extend to works of writing? That said, please don’t accuse me of trivialising anything when I say that it’s common for people to think and state openly that they can’t express how bad they feel when something truly terrible has happened to them e.g. if they have lost a child or been raped. Being a translator and therefore a professional linguist, I guess I like to think that if anyone can express anything in coherent language (where details of the memories of it are LEAST likely to fragment and dissipate over time), it’s someone who does what I do; but I’ll be honest with you: I couldn’t promise you that I could always manage it without leaning heavily on comparisons, whether they were to be understood as realistic or wildly detached enough from reality to leave just about anyone “lost”… for words or anything else. I’m not stupid. An attempted definition of a word which is based purely on what it means compared with the meaning of other words, is too woolly for practical purposes, isn’t it?
People don’t agree that they could misunderstand something if they agree that it doesn’t make sense, do you know what I mean? But for something to be defined as “not making sense”… that’s too vague, isn’t it?
Maybe, just maybe, if I am going to make people believe that I am some kind of super-hotshot professional translator, I should freely admit to being prone to asking questions which I don’t know why I’m asking at the time (as long as they’re faithful to a sense of duty in what I do, of course). At any rate, I look at lists of words in various languages which are not so easy to translate (like this one http://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-fou… ), realising how this can extend to whole phrases and sentences as well; in recognition of all my clients who expect / yearn to be carefree with regard to what I’m supposed to do for them, I would rather have my translation work be reflective of astute “make-believe” than wholly uncertain “let-believe”, especially when I have no idea how much research the client is prepared to undertake in connection with what I write in order to ensure its veracity and reliability (if any). And I really, really wouldn’t want to know that anything I had ever said or written had proven to be falsely enlightening – and therefore potentially confusing, possibly with the result of someone becoming angry – after I had been forced to acknowledge that what I had said was incorrect even though I had said it in good faith. All I’m saying is that the more you practice translation the more inclined you become to regard it as a matter of the pursuit of the truth, as Ted Hartrup discusses so eloquently in episode 3 of the Ambition series on Zapdramatic (the psychological assessment), depending on the choices you make. Personally, for me it’s intriguing enough that I wonder if the character of Ted Hartrup is based on that of a real person, whether that’s supposed to the case (strictly speaking) or not. #PursuitOfTheTruth
Speaking of hashtags – and that was the first time I’ve ever used one – I would agree that people use them with words and concepts with which they, effectively, openly imply: “Let anyone say what they will about this if it is to be better defined – I just don’t care about it that much.” Now that sounds like a mindset to be avoided when you’re trying to create a product of correct and reliable – and, indeed, responsible – translation! I’m certainly used to translation and I find it easy enough most of the time, but I would suggest that it’s one of those things where a careless oversight when doing it could (possibly – depending on the details) lead to a mistake where identifying exactly what it was that led to it could prove a challenge; and only then comes the matter of actually correcting it.
I’m probably going to make a lot of enemies saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway. In a sense, translation is an exercise in being committed – wholly committed – “telling it how it is”. Maybe I should be claiming that I’m always the first to deal with text written in a foreign language ad nauseum for the right reasons. And you don’t need to be a genius to know that one purpose of communication is the revelation of truth. That said, it intrigues me to consider how many people have said something truthful which was redundant – maybe because it was a truth that was already known – but they still expected credit for it by virtue of their honesty and frankness. But among the times when I’m most satisfied in my work as a translator are when I translate something by writing something which I know in my heart indicates a truth capable of shattering a lie.