The art of polishing a translation
Translators are, most often, paid by the word. Now this may or may not be the fairest pricing system to both translators and their clients, but one thing it seems to encourage is haste.
Translators have to work fast. They need to know the subject they translate and write well enough that the sentence is pretty much the way they want it the first time they type it.
Need for speed
With rates kept low by increasing competition, making a living can be a real challenge, and the oft quoted industry standard production of 2,000 words per day seems far too little both to make ends meet, and to satisfy the speed and volume many clients demand.
Something’s gotta give. To produce the kind of volume required of today’s translators, the first thing to suffer is often a thorough review of one’s own work. I’m a firm believer that, no matter how good the translator, an unrevised translation is only half done.
And primarily what lacks is the fluency. Meaning is usually intact (although clunky phrases have a way of distorting meaning, too). Translation is this bizarre skill–for those who have not tried it–that requires you to be fully engaged in grasping the meaning of a source text while at the same time disengaging to report on what you see. You have to be two people at the same time: an understanding self and a writing self.
Because if your understanding self takes over the whole process, you’ll end up with translated words but it will read very much like a translation. Of course if your writing self steals the show, the translation will read beautifully (although I wouldn’t rely on it in a court of law). Assuming both roles simultaneously is tricky — akin to a driver parking his tractor trailor in a tight space only looking in his mirrors. Some part of him has to ignore his what he sees, and mentally step around to the other side of the mirror.
For the translator, this is very rarely a one-step process. The all-important second step, revision, gives the translator the chance to view the text from the other side of the mirror. And it always needs minor adjustments.
Beginning translators are doubly encouraged to get into this habit. Read the translation aloud, too, if you can. We as translators can be too quick to say, “that’s what it says in the original.”
Sometimes this is true, for many source documents are clunky themselves, but more often a thorough rereading of the translation will reveal not just arbitrary meanings or grammar mistakes–which all speakers of a language commit–but constructions a native speaker would never make. Only a two-step translation process will bring these to light.
13 responses so far ↓
1 Karilyn // Sep 10, 2010 at 8:09 am
Interesting article. There has to be a give and take here between rates, deadlines and translation quality. One could go on improving a translation forever but how can one afford to? The deadline comes, the next client needs their translation. Stagnating rates as you mention aren’t helping things. Good topic.
2 Glenn // Sep 10, 2010 at 8:21 am
Karilyn,
Thanks for reading. You’re right, there are many constraints preventing a translator from spending too much time in the revision process, namely the need to make money.
However, with machine translation nipping at our heels, and its hallmarks being speed and low price, we have to put our best foot forward — quality. And one good rereading of a translation makes a world of difference in my opinion.
Thanks for the comment,
Glenn
3 language translation services // Sep 13, 2010 at 2:50 am
Our job is to translate and I certainly don’t think we should spend an overly large amount of time thinking about how the text looks. We’re employed to TRANSLATE the document not to make it look good. I simply don’t have the time to do that kind of thing
4 Glenn // Sep 13, 2010 at 7:49 am
I’m not really talking about how the text looks — that’s another topic, and worth a discussion, too — more how it reads. I’ve always considered reviewing/revising as an integral part of the translation process, so time needs to be built in for it. Which means if I have a 5:00 pm deadline, I should not be typing the last words of my “first draft” at 4:45. And when I estimate the amount of words I can do, I need to figure in the time needed for revision.
Thanks for reading,
Glenn
5 steve vitek // Sep 13, 2010 at 3:10 pm
What you are saying may be very well true about some translation fields, but I don’t think that it applies to patent translation.
When you translate patents, trying to change anything in the original in the interest of fluency may render you work unusable. For instance, claim 1 of a German PCT patent application that I translated this morning had 452 words crammed into one sentence consisting of subordinate clauses connected with commas. And that is how I had to translate it because you cannot have more than one sentence in one patent claim. I have translated Japanese claims that had more than 800 words in one sentence. Obviously, these are monstrous sentences, and they are often almost incomprehensible because they are so long, but if I tried to break them up, I would lose the client.
I think that we should remember that every translation field has its own requirements and these requirements may be very different, or even exactly opposite, depending on the field.
6 Glenn // Sep 13, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Steve,
Excellent point. Thanks for adding that. What you’re translating and why is a huge consideration on how you translate. I guess there are a few translators who can change gears, from patents, to corporate memos to ad copy and sense how many liberties to take.
In this post, I was speaking of an issue I see often, namely (unnecessarily) stiff and clunky translations, not because the original was stiff and clunky (although sometimes it is, as we know), but because it is NOT yet a translation until the English is as native to an English speaker as the original was to a native Spanish or Korean or Russian speaker.
For patents, the challenge is different. I guess we can’t call it fluency, because patent claims don’t flow by nature. Your client’s goals hinge on the broadness or narrowness of those claims so you probably don’t want to go rearranging clauses or looking for prettier synonyms.
There seems to be a spectrum, with certain fields of translation imposing many constraints and very literal renderings, while other modes are open to (even necessitating) creativity and adaptation.
And just as your client doesn’t want you to get creative with their patents, an advertising client wouldn’t be too happy if you didn’t!
Thanks for reading!
Glenn
7 Cynthia // Sep 18, 2010 at 1:07 pm
First, RE: language translation services, you don’t need to make it look good but at least you have to make sure your product (translation) can be used (read) by your customers smoothly (fluently). If one just wants to have a crap English version of a French article (but not a fluently written English article), why not Google Translate? It’s free and you are paid!
Second, I like your first paragraph, Glenn. But I think one of the major reasons was said above: cheap rate. Next to senseless clients, cheap rate is one of the many factors that always encourage low quality. There are just too many clients who love to bargain. This act seems to me is that they have chosen me and want to see if there is any chance to ask for a low price. My only response is “take it or leave it” because I’d rather lose a client than send a piece of crap back to my client and lose my brand!
8 Glenn // Sep 19, 2010 at 9:28 am
Cynthia,
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Everyone loves a bargain, right?
We do have to distinguish, though, between (1) those who have no experience with translation prices, and who get sticker shock, and (2) those who cynically try to bargain you down because their bottom line doesn’t really make too much room for a difference in quality.
In the former case, I had a neighbor into model trains who had just bought a beautiful engine for his set. The specs were all in Japanese — about 5 8.5″x11″ pages, double sided of tiny type. He said, “Hey, Glenn, you’re in translation. Could you get this translated for me sometime this week?” When I told him it would cost about $3,000 to $4,000, he was flabbergasted. This is just an extreme example of clients who don’t think translation will make that much of a dent in their budget.
On the other side are the project managers who are told to get better margins. Their superiors only talk to them about quality when clients are upset — otherwise margins are the only issue.
But translators can become cynical focussing too much on the business side of translation, which was the point of my post. They can get the impression the client isn’t really looking at quality, just price and speed. And this can cause them to avoid the important step of reviewing their work.
Agencies have to realize it makes good business sense to use translators who consistently hand in good work. It avoids both lots of costly clean-up work, and headaches from unhappy clients.
A movie director once said, good directing is 90% casting. This goes for translation, too.
Thanks again for reading!
Glenn
9 Katja // Sep 20, 2010 at 7:47 am
Thank you for this interesting article! My understanding self is just fine, but it’s the writing self that I sometimes struggle with. So I signed up for writing classes! I think that a translator must be, in addition to everything else, a keen and good and well-trained writer.
10 Glenn // Sep 20, 2010 at 8:04 am
Katja,
Thanks for reading. Writing classes makes great sense for a translator. It will give you more tools to work with. As a translator, it’s very easy to reach for the same translation every time we see the same expression in the source language. Often when we do that we neglect a couple other options that would make the translation better.
To use a French example, many dictionaries translate “dans le cadre de” as “within the framework of,” and now many translators use it automatically.
Yet, in my opinion, “within the framework of” would not be used in English outside of a stiffly legal or official context (the French use their expression in both formal and informal contexts). So we should have other options available to us depending on the context.
Good writing skills can really set you apart from other translators.
Glenn
11 Cynthia // Sep 21, 2010 at 11:38 am
Hi Glenn,
Yes, many clients who have no experience in translation should not be blamed for bargaining, and this is our job to educate them and tell them the truth. But for those bargainers who buy translations regularly… speechless.
But there are always smart buyers anyway. They also play tricks of course because this is their job but they never risk buying a poor product. But I always think that their are also just too many freelancers that all bargainers are fools. They just helplessly play a joke on them on the one hand, but sell dirt cheap and accept jobs excessively on the other hand.
By the way it’s really quite ridiculous for any kind of businessmen to save the money by risking the quality of their product and then the income flow, instead of investing a bit more to buy/produce a good one (at least satisfactory) and yield sales growth and loyal clients. This is Business 101 (and I call it “common sense”) that even a 6-year old knows that!
Cynthia
12 Melissa // Oct 7, 2010 at 4:13 am
Glenn, this is great insight. I especially love how you described having to be two people at once: an understanding self and a writing self. Subjectivity is a big problem when translating and it can never be all together eliminated, but this is a good way of looking at it.
I’m honestly not trying to plug our blog here, but I think this interview is along the same lines and could be of interest:
http://blog.csoftintl.com/good-and-great-translators/
13 yndigo // Nov 12, 2010 at 11:06 am
[...] by a reaction to my last post from a translator who contends, “We’re employed to TRANSLATE the document [...]
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