Translation Strategy

HOW TO DISCUSS APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION / TRANSLATION STRATEGY? AND SHOULD ONE REALLY BELIEVE THAT ANY GIVEN APPROACH / STRATEGY WILL ALWAYS WORK?

I’m sure I’ve done work for clients who, at the time that they were looking for someone to do the translation job that I would end up doing for them, specifically had it in mind that they wanted someone who wouldn’t treat the job as “just another translation job”. Quite apart from the common business notion whereby different clients have different needs (and, not uncommonly, different standards / expectations), the truth is that sometimes when someone wants something translated they specifically want a translator with the unique terminology and / or expressions and / or style that they know exist in a given field – not just someone who regards themselves as a “good” translator, and even if they do in fact have some sort of respectable portfolio of evidence to back it up. I thought about these clients in particular as I wrote this latest comment.

Whatever the situation, maybe you’re wondering right now how I would elaborate my own translation approach / strategy. And even if it is every bit as good and effective one as I would have you believe, how to put it forth in a way that wins the interest and confidence of the average man in the street, and without boring them? I must admit, it’s much easier to mention the qualities I endeavour to apply with my translation work: analytical, inventive and speculative are the ones which first come to mind. But I will resolve to state that my own translation process includes the following: I go through it sentence by sentence, and when I read through each one in the original material in turn I am determined to be as responsive as I should be to at least the keywords that give it the meaning it is supposed to have (I do mean its real meaning, not just whatever meaning I see in it) – it’s just that taking common sense for granted is not always a good idea. Then after I’ve finished writing a credible translation of it I check it for typos, coherence and reader-friendliness, including bringing the “feel” of it (as imparted by the existing stylistic aspects) into question. Sometimes I remain unsure about something even after all this, so I let the client know – I highlight the point in question and attach a post-it note saying “Please verify” or “What do you really think about this?” or something like that. To be honest, sometimes the case is one where I have written a translation which I know to be correct even if it sounds a little odd, and the question is, “Do you want to have a go at rewriting this?”

Moving on: it is said that people don’t suspect the obvious; which is precisely why I want to point out here that every part of a translation should make something clear to the reader and one thing only – just like the thing it’s a translation of, really. When it comes to translating something that is specifically mentioned as in a given field or subject: there is a difference between having an interest in a given field or subject (that any to-be-translated document may belong to) and being little more than hypnotised by your own attachment with it i.e. aspects of your own personal history where it can be identified, and your own expectations and biases of it based wholly on empirical evidence.

At any rate, when I write an English translation of something I certainly owe it to the client to write proper and clear English, even I do have questions that need clarifying. In a nutshell, a keen focus and a readiness to justify my decisions coherently are more than things that guide me properly when I do it; they are the norm, even if it is an unspoken one. (Funnily enough, I think of the time I recently said, “I’ll be bluntly” in a phone conversation with someone. To me, “I’ll be bluntly” isn’t correct English, but I was merely caught between saying “I’ll be blunt” and “to put it bluntly” – maybe you surmised that already?) If I really need to provide an example / exercise here, let’s look at the first line of the famous poem “I Wondered Lonely As A Cloud” by William Wordsworth. Do you agree that translators “see language differently” from “ordinary” people? I look at the words “I wondered lonely as a cloud” and just think, “Well, ‘I wondered’ by itself is enough to constitute a sentence no less than all six words…”, “Clouds and loneliness – are there people who habitually regard clouds as lonely or is this just a one-off idea that is part of the content of the poem?…”, “With the words ‘I wondered’, did this person just ‘go wondering from not wondering’ or was it like ‘they were already in a state of wondering when they started having these musings which I see reproduced in this poem…?” …I could read the whole poem and document all manner of random ideas like this, but I won’t. But the point is that everything I think of like this when I am reading the original version of a document that I am translating is capable of having a bearing on how I write its translation. Whether I’m right or wrong, it’s all about my own conviction in the veracity of what I write just being there and easily identifiable to the reader – what else? (Right here I thought of saying “be the reader a suspecting one or an unsuspecting one”, but then we all know that there are all kinds of written texts that just don’t have absolutely anyone as their target readership.) But this is only part of it. Is it really that hard to tell the difference between writing about something and writing about what you see in it? When I wrote about the group Paramore in an earlier comment (dated 25th June) – which was it in that case?

I know I’ve mentioned the old British TV show Mind Your Language before in at least one of these comments (a comedy show in which foreigners from various countries learn English as a foreign language; Barry Evans plays their teacher). Maybe what I’m about to say in this paragraph reflects a true understanding of it and the reasons why it was as successful as it was. I think we would all agree that those whose mother tongue is not English usually have some sort of a properly defined “approach” or “strategy” when it comes to using English, than native speakers of English do. With this, when non-native speakers of English speak English, their comments in the language are much less likely to be shaped by what can only be described as remnants of their own personal experiences which are significant to them (however meaningless they may be to anyone else) or by their own expectations of things in life and biases, compared with native speakers. Compare that with these two things:

1. I received a spam email today whose subject line was, “Do you really know his past? Free background check” (it probably had something to hide). But when I read the subject line my first thought was that this was aimed at women and that by “his past” they were talking about the past of their male partner (so to speak) – all because of that single word “his”. But maybe I really am wrong here? Maybe it could be regarded as more generic?

2. Have you ever noticed that people involved in finance (stocks and shares and all that carry-on) talk about “spikes” from time to time? Assuming you know what is meant by it – a brief period of a boom with something – why do you think they call it that? What if I suggested that the reason is like this: when there is a very short boom with something, what happens is that it’s only a matter of time before it is reflected on whatever line charts by the line going steeply upward for a bit and then steeply back down again – a “spike”.