yndigo

Confidence and Experience in Translation

Watching the French Open finals this morning between Dinara Safina and Svetlana Kuznetsova, I heard “S’il vous plaît, mesdames et messieurs” come over the loudspeaker to quiet the crowd before play (By the way, when did the wave make its transition to the tennis stadium?).

My very funny wife Jen echoed the French with her intentionally awkward and accented, “If it PLEEZES you, laideeez and zjentlemen.” I don’t know why it made me laugh so much.

Of course we don’t dissect the phrase like that when we translate. Just like we don’t literally render the close of a letter, “Please agree, Madame, to the assurance of my distinguished sentiments.” We say “Yours truly” or “Sincerely” or some other anglified formula.

Pretty obvious to translators. Yet, many still resort to the old “That’s what it says in the original” when dealing with less formulaic phrases. If it is correct and fluent in the original, it should be correct and fluent in the translation. And even when it’s not correct, we don’t always have an excuse. Because although it’s common to find grammar mistakes in the original document, they are often made by a native speaker. Thus the idiom is still native, and the translation should be native too.

Here’s an example: native English speakers often say, “Between he and I.” This is an example of an attempt at hypercorrectness and it’s wrong. Yet people born and raised speaking English do it all the time (in fact, I doubt a non-native speaker would make this same mistake unless he spends too much time around us!). We cannot translate this into French as “Entre il et je” because no native French speaker would ever say that. The only solution is to gloss over this mother-tongue mistake.

And when the source document is free of errors, there’s simply no excuse at all for a less than fluid translation. I read a translation last week that was frankly horrible. The translator just couldn’t be bothered to put words into their English order or even rout out false friends. Or spell-check for that matter! (one of my pet peeves). I think he knows better in fact, just didn’t review his work. He left far too much work for the editor. He was fast. I’ll say that for him. But not worth it.

Often a translation that sticks too closely to the original is the result of a lack of confidence. There is what I call “the steady hand” in translation, a translator — often seasoned — who is able to cut through the dense source idiom. These individuals, while never taking liberties with key terms, don’t get tripped up by the inherent “differentness” of the source language. It takes a nuanced understanding of the original to gain this sort of confidence. Along with years of experience solving how to put it into another language.