ACCEPTING CORRECTIONS WITH HUMILITY – INCLUDING WHERE MY EDUCATION FAILS TO SERVE ME WELL AND THE CRUCIAL FACTOR OF WHAT PEOPLE (INCLUDING ME) REALLY SEE IN WHAT I WRITE

I do most of my work in the form of translation projects for translation agencies abroad, online. Probably the most frustrating thing about my work is when, after I have submitted a completed translation project to someone who is the project manager allocated to it, that project manager gets back to me insisting that they have something to say about certain English expressions that I have used in my translated product, even though their mother tongue is not English like mine is. Sometimes they merely point out minor typos but from time to time they also make very good but unexpected correction suggestions that I am compelled to agree with, or at least appreciate whole-heartedly. This happens even though I undertake my work with great care: I’m committed to thorough consideration and scrutinising of the content of the original as well as the expressions I use in my translation product. I certainly know that a casual and “rush” approach when translating anything that is supposed to be formal in some way is a very bad idea. But there are times when I struggle to translate a really difficult phrase in French or German with confidence and conviction, but I always put something that reflects a definite level of consideration and a diligent and sincere approach, even if I do have to insert a note which points out that I am not too sure about it.

I have worked for people in countries all over the world: the list includes the Czech Republic, Thailand, Lithuania, and Ecuador to name a few. I definitely don’t always speak the native language of the project manager giving me a translation project. But when they do have something in my translation work to criticise, sometimes I wonder if it was something to do with the learning of their own language which helped them to catch what I missed, or imagine something that I, for all my own education and knowledge, just couldn’t. Ultimately it is a matter of what they “see in the material”, and not just the concept of merely understanding the words on the paper (or should that be the screen?) as a message that exists to convey some sort of information, and only that, in language which is (well, certainly should be, if my work deserves any kind of merit) linguistically correct. (Of course, I should add that sometimes I need to realise the particular register is supposed to play a role beyond just stating something that makes sense; like persuasion.)

For example, “destinataires” is the language of emails in French – not the correspondence contained therein – in that it means “recipients”. Here I “see something” in this French word and its English counterpart which I don’t think everyone would from the start: when you write an email you have to insert the list of recipients, the person(s) whom it is “destined” for. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that just because an email is destined for someone doesn’t mean that they actually will RECEIVE it as the recipient (and even if they do, will they actually open it and read it? But that’s another subject.)

I want to compare writing a translation to writing a story. When I write a translation for someone else I’m not the author of the content of the original or the story behind it, like I would be if I wrote a story. And while works of fiction always have a fixed, rigidly defined beginning and end, translations usually refer to real-life events and situations that are but parts of a bigger ongoing picture. For example, I’ve translated lease documents before, but these are just part of the bigger story of someone renting property for a given purpose and for whatever period of time. I have translated French and German marketing material knowing full well that it would end up as part of the business history of whatever company requested the English version. But neither of these things are any of my business; I just play the role of translator. Compare this to the fact that, if I write a story… well, whether it’s good or bad, everything in it is my business, simply because I decide everything that happens in it. It all depends on my imagination. And I call upon my imagination when writing translations as well. But anything can happen in stories – maybe you’ve seen cartoons where a character walks off a cliff or something and is then walking on thin air, but they don’t fall until they realise that they are not standing on anything. And there lies the difference between the imagination required for story writing and the imagination required for competent translation work: when I do translation work I have to agree that I can somehow justify or explain everything that I write. Mind you, like I said earlier, in all honesty, there are times in my work where I leave a comment for the project manager asking for someone else’s opinion about something because, as far as I see it, that is the only thing that helps me to agree that I really am conveying the right and accurate meaning about something to someone else… a paying customer, no less.
That said, this is the point where I start talking about the song Friday (Rebecca Black). Yes, that awful song. If I’m not mistaken, it originally came out on Youtube. I say this because one thing I have noticed about it is how the lyrics depend on the video to let people know what’s happening in the song – show people what they are supposed to think…

“7 am, waking up in the morning,
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs,
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal,
Seeing everything, the time is going,
Ticking on and on, everybody’s rushing,
Gotta get down to the bus stop, gotta catch my bus,
I see my friends…
Kicking in the front seat,
Sitting in the back seat,
Gotta make my mind up,
Which seat can I take?”

Consider this: try to imagine the average person who knows the song, and then ask, what are the chances that they first listened to it on Youtube, where they saw the video accompanying it? I’d say it’s pretty high, wouldn’t you? Although it’s widely agreed that the song is bad in several ways (I certainly agree that Rebecca was a fool to pursue fame as a singer with it), I’d say that one of these is that the lyrics, at least certainly those of the first verse (above), just defy any form of sensible or logical explanation and they quite literally jump from one thing to the next, seemingly at random, and it’s all very quick. At the very start of the video she wakes up in bed and sits up, and sings a little bit, then all of a sudden she’s standing somewhere else indoors, and she sings a bit more then walks away; next thing we know she’s at a bus stop. By this point, she has specifically mentioned in the song that she has got to catch a bus, yet her friends turn up out of the blue in a car for some reason, at which point she decides to take her lift with them – what? And then she says, “which seat should I take?” even though there’s only one left (if you watch the video you’ll see that there are four people in the car before Rebecca gets in it; something no-one involved in the production of the music video seemed to notice, but that observation is part of a “A normal day for Rebecca Black” joke floating around on the Internet).

But what I’m trying to say is: I would say that if people don’t have the option of watching the video with the song when they hear it for the first time, it is not unlikely that they will end up confused and not knowing what to think – even if it is only for a bit. For example, when she says that she’s got to go down to the bus stop to catch a bus, and then she sees her friends, and then all of a sudden she starts talking about seats… can you imagine, “oh, so her friends are in a car, are they?… I didn’t catch that until just now, when she said the words ‘front seat’ and ‘back seat’ after she happened to mention that she had seen them at all… I just thought that they would have been standing at the bus stop…” Like, what are we supposed to think?

MY WORK AND REALMS OF KNOWLEDGE

I recently did a multilingual abstracting project for a Russian translation agency, which required me to read all these documents related to certain lease contracts written in German and identify certain bits of information from them which I was supposed to include in these forms. It was a case of fill in the blanks; the answers lay in the documents – somewhere. I think I included most of the important information where it was due, but sometimes I wasn’t sure what to put for certain blanks in the forms, or not even too sure what a certain question was asking. And I had to deal with the (unestimated) probability of no information for certain questions waiting to be found in the documents, or if I could forget about having to fill in certain blanks. I say this because I (sort of) believe that there is not knowing what to think; then there is not knowing what to think if you tried. Does that make sense? Too much of the latter would probably be enough to drive a person crazy, wouldn’t you think? (Having said that, didn’t I basically make the exact same point in a different way in a Facebook comment I submitted on 15th May – the one with the link to a rap battle?)

Yes, one thing I can’t overlook in my work is my belief that to become too comfortable with doing things that are straightforward is perilous. Basically, knowledge is everything… and guess what, I feel like talking about knowledge here! I researched the difference between a priori and a posteriori, and in my writing of this comment I have committed myself to talking about things like the differences between empirical knowledge and intuitive knowledge, and how I apply them in my work for better results. If you feel like reading further is going to be daunting, can I just ask: which one is the real “common sense knowledge”? (LOL)

Now, some knowledge is not knowledge worth the name. I think Namibia is an example of a very little known country in the world. I say this because I could tell you that its capital is Windhoek, and this is something that you could say to everyone else and it would pass for a correct statement. But if you don’t know where Namibia is (anyone?), then it’s all just… fake, you know? Even if you KNEW that Windhoek was the capital of Namibia like I’ve just told you here (and didn’t know it before), and you KNEW it to be correct, if you just said to someone, “Windhoek is the capital of Namibia” without knowing where Namibia is or anything like that, you could not hope to prove anything verifiable other than source you heard it from. Seriously, what would be the point? Note that I’m specifically not including a link in this comment to anywhere listing basic information on Namibia; if it matters to you, you can find it yourself. Turn to Google, turn to your geography teacher, turn to a toy globe – turn to whatever you want; just don’t ask me to provide you with anything that confirms that Windhoek is the capital of Namibia. I won’t. Full stop.
But I want to talk about knowledge in connection with my work as a translator. To exhibit an interest in performing masterful translation work in its true form is to accommodate a multi-faceted imagination challenge. As a language professional, I guess the truth is that I’m always seeking a priori truths in the field of linguistics (and, to a certain extent, the subject matter of whatever it is I happen to be translating) to make things easier and help me feel more confident, but what I really can’t ignore is a perceived need to question my a posteriori knowledge of given words or expressions on a very frequent basis. When deciding what I should really write for this, that or the other, I never act like I expect to find the solution through something like the basis of deduction (which I think is a more maths and science thing anyway).

On translator forums, like ProZ.com, talk about a translator having specialised knowledge in a given field is common. Some go out of their way to emphasise that it is important, and I can veritably agree to a certain extent. I am just one of many people who have discussed how translation requires certain skills and knowledge that are not specifically taught from textbooks in a classroom environment. It may be easy for some to agree that there are some things that you may learn, but never master, until there’s “a part of you”, “something inside of you” – something most personal and intangible, like a thought or an idea (and it doesn’t matter if it’s as detached from reality as anything you’ve seen on Power Rangers) – that you have come to habitually relate to activity involving the subject in question. Have you ever been discouraged from trying to learn something because something about it was put to you in terms that are usually familiar to you, but not on that occasion – terms that most people are familiar with? For example, consider the expressions “internal use” and “external use”. I could understand if you only think of “internal” as meaning “inside a thing” and “external” meaning “outside a thing”, and feeling hopelessly lost as you respond like, “…meaning?” wherever you see “internal use” and / or “external use” mentioned.
And these are the things I ponder as my stories of how I deal with the utter abstractness of language in translation work continue…
In German “Nachweis” means “proof” but it also means “certificate”, depending on the context. In a sense a certificate is definitely proof, although “proof” in English can be something tangible or just the concept of proof, evidence.

In one German to English translation project, I read the word “Raumlüftung” in the original. “Room” or “space” ventilation? Specifically “rooms”? What about corridors and whatnot?
In one German to English translation project, one bit in the original was “Der Projekt-Ansprechpartner des Auftraggebers kann die Agenda bis zu zwei Werktage vor dem Koordinationsgespräch ändern und/oder ergänzen”, which I translated as “The client’s project contact partner may change and / or supplement the agenda at any point up to two working days prior to the coordination meeting”. But I nearly translated it more literally, like “they can change it up to two working days prior to the coordination meeting”. The former English translation and the latter one are not quite the same, for what they suggest about the valid change possibilities. The latter sort of suggests that only one change occasion is permissible. I’m very sure that, had I put the latter, someone out there would have labelled it as a bad quality thing.

The German word “Projektabwicklung” can mean project management or completion / transaction. As both project management and project completion are common things to hear in connection with the world of work, it’s important not to get confused there, huh!?

In another German-to-English project, the German word “Schnecke” meant not “snail”, but “screw” – but I instantly saw what they have in common (spiral traits). But I would not necessarily have seen things like this in the past. It used to be the case that whenever I saw the German word “Schnecke” I thought, “snail” in English, but never “screw”. This would have been most likely when I was at school, I think. Sound familiar?

In another German to English project: “Wo dürfen Getränke aufgehoben und konsumiert werden”. I wondered: does it mean where may drinks be “picked up” (from surfaces), “or removed”? My answer: I put “taken” – it “works” whichever it is, when you think about it!