I’m sure that I just missed something out with my last business Facebook comment – I’d say that this is the best I can add to it.
I’m sure it won’t be hard to understand what I’m talking about when I say that translating for a living is just fundamentally different from the translation work I did during my language classes back at school / university; mainly because I always do it for someone other than myself – as it is, I don’t even expect to be informed of their identity with more than 90% of the translation projects I accept!
The so-called “art of translation”, what is that exactly? I’ve stumbled on the idea of comparing “reading without trying” vs. “reading with trying”. You just know as well as I do that people tend to do the former all the time – certainly when they’re reading things written down in their mother tongue – although they may think of it as more like the latter when they are trying to “read between the lines”… whether that’s something related to reading a newspaper story or something else entirely. And while accepting translation as an art may well help to bring out your creative side when you do translation, I would dismiss translation as an art in the sense that, when I do it, I’m “not here to be expressive, but to be reflective.” In other words, personal preconceptions or prejudices must never be allowed to get in the way of my reasoning of the material that I am supposed to convey the meaning of in a new language; and I would say that that indicates an example of the difference between the concept of “objective” and the concept of “subjective” if there ever was one.
Not that it stops with what I acknowledge in the source material. I am compelled to “try to read” the English translation I write because, even if a translation does its job in theory, people can still get ideas in connection what it’s supposed to be about that I never intended; and then who would be “to blame” if not me? I talked about hypotheticals in my last comment. I embrace these hypotheticals not just in the domain of reasoning of what I understand in the original version in a translation project, but also in the domain of what I actually write in the translation product. What follows is an example of the latter rather than the former. This week I did a translation of a technical document for which one translation sentence I wrote was, “If higher settings are required please inform Fram.” I needed no help to look at that sentence out of context (in detachment), and that’s why I asked myself, “should I add the word ‘accordingly’ on the end or not?” For choosing not to add it would suggest the idea of merely informing Fram that higher settings were required; but to me, adding “accordingly” on the end suggests a little bit more than that. For a moment, I put myself in the shoes of the user: I find that “to inform Fram accordingly” here (as opposed to “to inform Fram”) means to inform Fram not just of the fact that higher settings are required, but with the inclusion of details of exactly what higher settings are actually required. And I thought of this without being briefed on what might constitute applicable settings.
And that’s that.