TRANSLATION: TO BELIEVE OR NOT TO BELIEVE, THAT IS (ONLY PART OF) THE QUESTION

It’s easy for me to state that I am proud to have been self-employed for 14 years. And never
mind the fact that I succeeded in starting up my business during an international recession, or
that I get to perform and live by my own rules over anyone else’s. I have welcomed and
embraced the otherwise unmentioned “adventure factor” from the start, ready (at least to a
certain extent) to face the unending question of how my career would change my life, and
indeed myself, and by extension just how far my abilities really could let me accomplish,
from day one. Gandhi quote: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to
live forever.” Figuratively speaking, in my working life I continue to play my cards (full deck
or not) – my game – my way… while making a point of (hopefully) avoiding being too
inclined to treat “my way” as the only way I can understand or respect.
That said, in all humility, maybe I really do still have a lot to learn. I’m reminded of this
every time a translation task I’m doing forces me to reckon with a conundrum (which often
extends beyond just a “logical” one defined by branches of knowledge that I’ve already
become familiar with and learned to appreciate, that can be categorised easily enough in one
way or another) in which I let my usual everyday capacity for reasoning (both as I know it
and as I DON’T know it, when you think about it) take over but I know in my heart that it’s
just not enough. A common case of this is when I come across an acronym I’m not familiar
with which initially leaves me wondering whether this is even in the language being
translated from (either French or German, in my case) or English (this is quite common in
medical, for example). And honestly, even today, sometimes I’m compelled to turn to Google
Translate to translate part of a particularly challenging sentence in French or German, if only
to help myself arrive at some starting point in terms of the process of acquiring the right level
of coherence. (Hey, in my experience, there are translation agencies that claim to forbid its
translators from using machine translators while still allowing, nay expecting and as such
encouraging, the use of “CAT tools” – “CAT” standing for “computer-assisted translation”.
In the industry, common CAT tools include Trados and MemoQ, and I have actually used
MemoQ myself, if only to a very limited extent.)
Like it or not, such is how the true scope of differences between languages should be
acknowledged, and the (largely unpredictable) results of it all. I translate from French and
German to English for a living. Well, there are certain rules not just with grammar and
vocabulary, but also expression itself, in English which just aren’t compatible with French or
German, and certain rules not just with grammar and vocabulary, but also expression itself, in
French and German which just aren’t compatible with English. And I really would go far
enough to say that you hardly need to be a professional translator, like me, to know this (just
ask Malinda Kathleen Reese – see her video “My real thoughts on translation” on YouTube).
In my case, at least, I have come to accept that certain generally unmentioned points in the art
of translation are no less valid in the world of business (don’t forget, I am a self-employed
translator, and that’s what I do), nay life itself; not least that one should not “limit their mind”
and the scope of the question of what they believe in or don’t believe in, to things that have
been already explained or demonstrated to them. For example, in her song “A Happy Place”,
Katie Melua sings of “hoping for some understanding” (although she doesn’t say exactly
what of), in which one can but imagine what her idea of “a happy place” is really like. And I
read Animal Farm at school, but this version, which I first watched only recently, seems to
me to represent a notably different interpretation of it from the cartoon video of Animal Farm

I watched back at school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGzRf0Ow1qU I would say
that this one better emphasises the fact that the other humans in the story hold Mr. Jones in no
less contempt than the animals on his farm do; and then we have the conspiratorial efforts of
the pigs, and the role of propaganda in the story, better highlighted at 38:52-41:53. It’s not
just animals vs. humans and the animals on Animal Farm vs. the authoritarian and greedy
pigs. Indeed, Napoleon purges Snowball so he can claim credit for the windmill idea; and, in
this version, it’s blatantly obvious that Mr. Pilkington lies to Napoleon when he says that he
never wanted an invasion (when they start to trade). By the way, it was this version that made
me appreciate Napoleon as a character determined to be uncompromising, stern and ruthless
as a full-on opposite of the drunk and irresponsible Mr. Jones and the consequences of his
behaviour (maybe George Orwell knowingly intended that) – he doesn’t want Jones back any
more than the other animals do but it is soon evident that this has become an excuse for his
increasingly oppressive ways. And, for all the faults and the tyranny of the pigs, it doesn’t
reflect well on all the other animals that they just eat up all their propaganda for no other
reason that it’s so easy to do during their more idle moments. (And Squealer had the nerve to
claim that Napoleon installed that television for the animals’ “entertainment and relaxation”.)
I mean, what do you think “having an open mind” is really all about (besides “not just going
with the flow”)? It certainly is a concept worth pondering when you’re an entrepreneur!
But it was only after I started watching this particular version that I became all the more
attached to the character Boxer, the hardest working of all the animals – it can’t be an
accident that Orwell made him a horse. Anyway, he’s a gentle giant archetype, but more
importantly, he’s naïve and ignorant (from a political perspective) in this story. And they say
the happiest animals lead simple lives and that’s what the pigs want, not just because they
will then ask for relatively little (i.e. “maintenance costs”) but because it’s easier to retain
loyalty that way, even if they are less ambitious as a result. Well, when you take a moment to
acknowledge what the story alludes to in real life, Communism aimed to stifle competition
between businesses and such in that it was anti-private profit. In other adaptations of Orwell’s
work, it is argued that the pigs and dogs would fear Boxer (for his great strength), but I sure
don’t feel that that was ever meant to be the case in the particular adaptation of the story
linked to in this article. One last question: when the windmill was destroyed, while Napoleon
was falsely blaming Snowball for it, didn’t he ever suspect that it was in fact Jones who did it
(in which case he would be right, disturbingly enough)? I mean, you would think that he
would hate and fear Jones as much as the other animals do. But what it motivates him to do is
truly sinister. It’s so sad that none of this ever struck me when I was reading Animal Farm
under the guidance of a qualified teacher back at school – but at least I’m capable of bringing
this point to light today.
But let’s get back to the actual topic of this article. Speaking as both a translator and as an
entrepreneur: I should not fail to consider and reconsider what keeps me going – nay, what
keeps my thoughts organised, productive and relevant to the situation and subject matter at
hand – as I do my job. Put simply, a translator should not necessarily be afraid, embarrassed
or ashamed to admit it when something in a foreign language in a translation task they have
been charged with leaves them lost and confused, even if the elements of it all seem common
rather than relatively recondite. To me, an entrepreneur’s worst nightmare is being forced to
act on something which requires making a decision based on “truth” but there’s a dearth of
argument as to whether what it revolves around should or should not be believed. But if you
really do have any doubts as to my own capacity for creative thinking qualifying me as a
professional translator worth my salt, I have written plenty of articles and tweets related to
translation that couldn’t fail to disprove them.

I will end this with the following sample scenario taken from my career: one recent German-
to-English project I did featured an original product comprised of certain filled in forms, with
“Krankenversicherung” and “HEK” in the same in-form box. Now technically,
“Krankenversicherung” can mean “health insurance” (the general concept) or “[a] health
insurance company/body” – in this case, I originally decided, so to speak, that it meant
“health insurance” while at the same time believing I had a good reason to acknowledge
“HEK” as part of some reference number or code. But then, later, when I was tying up loose
ends and dealing with unanswered questions, I came to accept that “health insurance” really
should be “health insurance company/body” in this case, while “HEK” is a proper noun – the
name of the particular health insurance company/body that this particular person was
registered with. But can anyone blame me for not knowing that from the start? It’s not
exactly the sort of thing you expect a teacher to explain to you unprompted when they are
giving you a language lesson.