The study and practice of translation

THE STUDY AND PRACTICE OF TRANSLATION DEFINITELY ENCOMPASSES EXPLORATION OF ONE’S OWN THOUGHTS

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” (Jonathan Swift)

I think I’m the kind of person (or certainly A kind of person) who’s always ready to fight a cinder with an aftermath in terms of how much effort I’m prepared to expend if it will help me to remember something not just in the immediate future but forever, not least because I find it very easy to agree that it would help in my job. And after all, I’m supposed to be self-employed: if I won’t take charge of something like that (no matter what), then who will? Well, there’s only really one answer to that and it’s no-one (were you expecting something else?). Then again, I must be kidding myself if I keep fantasising that I could somehow “find a way to make all (or most) problems and challenges in translation hard, easy” and trust that these methods would work every time, to know that I could then “casually wave them away without really having to care that much”. I just want to be as coolly in control as I can in my job – for the right reasons.

There’s a joke where a narrator writes a letter to the British government in which he says that he’s at a loss to believe or understand the hoops he’s being expected to jump through in order to get a new passport in Britain. It’s a bit like that for me sometimes: while I regard myself as a very talented and serious professional translator – and aim to be modest about it – I would say that, every so often, I might feel at a loss to believe or understand certain “things” (readily defined or otherwise) about certain professional translation jobs which I simply have no choice but to confront… for better or worse.

Now, mine is a job which seems so easy to describe, doesn’t it? “I translate. That’s it.” It’s surely easy enough for many, many people to recall an example of translation from their own life, and anyone can look up “translation” in a dictionary. In the real world, though, sometimes doing my job properly involves what can only be described in simple terms as “resolving to look at what lies beneath the surface” – and while I like being able to work from the comfort of my own home, I can accept with grace that I could fall into certain “traps” if I ever got too comfortable in my work (and yes, I suppose I would be lying if I said I’d never given into temptation there). So I would agree to address what I “knowingly” don’t understand; unsolicited, of course (if that makes sense). And how? Maybe the most apt definition of what is necessary for something like this, is this: a kind of thinking which goes beyond merely learning, into “learning how to learn”. Part of it would be learning how to believe or, indeed, disbelieve things – such is a bona fide open mind, if you ask me. “Suspend your disbelief” – now who hasn’t heard that one before? But what were Paramore talking about in the end of their song “The Only Exception” with the lyrics, “I’m on my way to believing”? Actually, I really hope I don’t sound like I’m ridiculing that – it was none other than Hayley Williams who said, ““It’s sad when friends become enemies. But what’s even worse is when they become strangers.” …Right. Thumbs up to you, girl.

Now, I am highly literate but I understand that no translation task should be approached without an OPEN MIND with regard to the message intended in the original. It’s not just a matter of being correct on a linguistic level – I consider accuracy (both grammatical and informational) to be nothing less than essential in my work, but I also attach a solid level of emphasis to reader-friendliness – hence my autonomously named policy of “alternative verbal innovation”; if you can speculate what that means.

Just in case you really do need me to corroborate my claim that I am open-minded, let me mention two things now. Number one: I would say that it’s very hard or even impossible for most people to imagine what is meant by “dirty files”; a term which exists – on the ProZ.com forums, at least – only as the opposite of “clean files”, which in this context pertains to the subject of translation software and its use.

Number two: in a recent German to English project I saw this quote in the original: “Speziell entwickelte Schweinregelung über eine fliegende Umlenkrolle”, in which I decided that I should translate “Schweinregelung” as “pig regulation system” and not just “pig regulation”.

And me deciding to mention those things has, in turn, made me think of what someone might think if they had an instant messaging chat with someone online and they agreed to have all their comments to each other translated into a language neither person spoke by a machine translator before they sent them off, whereupon the recipient would translate them back into the first language also using a machine translator, all as part of enjoying the unchartered adventures of language. (I know I’ve mentioned this in an earlier comment long ago, in which I had included a Latvian translation of the joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” – and I don’t speak Latvian – before inviting readers to translate it back into English with a machine translation tool.) Do you think this game would work? Well, you’ll just have to try it and see!

Personally, for me it does beg the question of just how likely someone would be to underestimate how difficult any given easy-to-define professional occupation can be (or just “difficult to explain in real terms considering the challenges and expectations that it does actually impose when all is said, done and considered”). Like that of negotiator, for example; this coming from someone who has played the Ambition games (as available on ZapDramatic and Newgrounds).

All that said, I am now very sure that no-one has any good reason to try to impugn my honesty here. Anyway… in all seriousness (and candour), it’s not as if I never get concerned that I could end up confused about what I have learned at some point in the past, in the future. I remember once that my own mother once confirmed that lawyers are skilled at implanting false memories – it’s frightening, isn’t it? (But, for the grace of God, there are bits in the aforementioned Ambition games where you play the role of a lawyer.) But it doesn’t matter what you think or believe, and it doesn’t matter what your circumstances are: it just doesn’t pay to pretend that you can turn a posteriori knowledge into a priori knowledge or vice versa, whatever such a talent would mean to you. I consider myself a thoughtful and introverted person and I really do think that it’s sad that I cannot remember where I was when I arrived at the conclusion that the purpose of life is to overcome your fears – especially those that no-one else mentions. But it definitely happened when I was 32. (So this is what forcibly training yourself to be more competitive does to you…)

At any rate, I certainly know that I’ve ended up exploring my very thoughts in connection with language and what it means, time and time again, all for the sake of reinforcing my claim that I am a real, serious translator. And that’s why I say this: I’ve imagined this: imagine if you asked a small child to draw something e.g. a trainer. Now, we all know that a trainer is like a kind of shoe – strictly a more casual kind of shoe which is often worn for sports as we all know; but unless this small child is a really keen and perceptive artist chances are that all they will draw is a general outline of a shape of a trainer (maybe with some squiggly lines which are the laces or whatever) which is more or less correct, but then it’s also just (inevitably) a general outline of a shape of a shoe which is more or less correct, and it’s hardly more likely than not that there will be much if anything which indicates that this is indeed a trainer and not a shoe, and shoes are often made of leather and are polished and formal and refined etc. but trainers aren’t like that, do you know what I mean? Like, the child’s drawing may be correct in theory, but if it’s not precise enough to be helpful for something then it’s not precise enough to be helpful for it. It’s an analogy that I personally came up with when it comes to reckoning with the study and practice and translation. Haven’t I done well?

Of course, no-one can be expected to easily draw a picture which clearly explains what certain “concept words” mean, like “authority”, “infrastructure” or “conspiracy”. Why DID I once have to try and illustrate a double cross during a game of Pictionary? Not that it mattered because all I did was draw two Xs and that did the trick – LOL!

Yes, I appreciate how much the study of language has enlightened me as a person. For example, there was that night when I was having dinner with my family, and I started a conversation when I asked Dad if he had ever watched this DVD film about Gandhi which I bought him for Christmas. His response was that he hadn’t, but he had to laugh considering how long he had had it (it wasn’t even last Christmas that he received it – I don’t remember what year it was). But it’s what happened next that I want to bring up here: it was suggested, correctly, that I had once made up a term for personal possessions which you have had for a long time but you have never gotten round to savouring them (if it’s a DVD, you’ve never gotten round to watching it; if it’s a CD, you’ve never gotten round to listening to it; if it’s a book, you’ve never gotten round to reading it; whatever). I actually predicted that it would happen, and as such I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. Anyway, this term I made up is “dack”. It seems as good as anything, does it? And maybe they don’t remember specifically asking me this but they asked me why I called it that – which is hardly a clear kind of question, if you know what I mean. Maybe, in retrospect, they were wondering (if they didn’t realise it) why it’s not a made-up expression which is based on other words (like expressions like “sheeple”, “eating al desko”, “internest”; by all means Google those expressions right now if you have to). But no, in this case, “dack” is an expression which was made up entirely from scratch, if you know what I mean.

But one thing that really does make things a lot more complicated – even if it does provide countless opportunities for adventure, but that’s another subject – is how language is not static, any more than culture in general is static. Language changes, hence all these recommendations that I should visit France and Germany more often to keep my French and German “in touch” even though I’m more than capable in them. We can all argue how knowledge is meant to be acquired, but sometimes it’s just meant to change as well. Here’s just one example: I can still remember one of my professors at university saying that the French word “cambrioleur” (meaning “burglar”) used to be a greatly despised word on par with swearing, if you can believe that. Speaking of swearing, this is just a personal opinion but it’s probably only a matter of time before people would end up surprised to think that “shit” was once a swear-word: we can all argue that faecal matter, in itself, as clearly foul as it is, is hardly the most taboo thing in life (certainly when you look at some of the jokes told by Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr on stage), but my point here is that lots of people have used the expression “shit just got real” (and probably others like it) while reflecting no form of undeserved contempt or arrogance toward anything, and that’s just one example of its kind.

In another, French to English translation project I did recently, I used the translation tool MemoQ to do it. There is a screenshot attached. And, looking at the text of the original, I had to deal with not just the text to be translated in itself but with all these other software-created “text inserts” which alter how text appears in the final product (like HTML). Some words strictly were altered, some were not, but I kept having to find a way to leave only the same words altered in the English version (as those which were altered in the original) however differently the translation sentence may have been structured compared to the original. Now, I couldn’t have managed that without flexible thinking!

Put simply: as a professional translator, I keep on looking not just for “knowledge” but “enlightenment”, doing what it takes to remain confident that it will help even if I don’t yet know how. You know, how else I would I have been able to write something like this?