Translation and Interpreting Essay Example for Free

Translation and Interpreting Essay Introduction As I was preparing to put my ideas in order and reflect upon what I was going to write for my essay on International Communication, I suddenly remembered the last lecture on the subject. It was about translating and interpreting, so I figured out that an essay on the translation challenges in todays world would be a great idea to write about. I personally knew Dumitru Toncia, my sister-in-law relative, who had worked in the field for many years, so we had a meeting in which I took some interesting notes. He is specialized in English and French. There are a lot of definitions for International Communication, but I consider it to contain aspects of intercultural understandings, communicaton theory, intercultural communication, croscultural communication, mass communication, intercultural psychology, congnition psychology, area-study like society, culture, constitution, law, education, language etc Proper translation and interpreting has become more and more demanding, and this paper deals with the qualities translators or interpreters should posses in the international environment today. It also outlines some grammar and semantics issues that turn this filed into a real challenge. I hope the examples he drew from his experience in translation will give you an interesting insight into some of the most frustrating problems encountered when transferring ideas from one language to another. Taking part in the selection of candidates for translator jobs in international environments, Toncia has often been amazed by the fact that a number of candidates with a perfect knowledge of both the source and the target languages and an impressive mastery of the relevant field could be very poor translators indeed. Why is that? One of the human factors is the lack of modesty. The translators personality and intelligence interfere with the very humble task he has to perform. Instead of putting aside his own ideas, fantasies and style to follow blindly the authors, he merges, adds or transforms. Anyway, besides humility, candidates must possess two other qualities: judgment and flexibility. Judgment By judgment I mean the ability to solve a problem through wide knowledge of the field, through awareness that a problem exists and through taking into account the various levels of context. Wide knowledge of the field. Lets take the phrase to table a bill. The translator must know that if the original is in British English, it means to submit a bill i. e. a text proposed to become law to the countrys legislative body, in French deposer un projet de loi, but that if the author followed American usage, he meant to shelve, i. e. to adjourn indefinitely the discussion of the text, in French ajourner sine die lexamen du projet de loi Here is another example. The word heure in French can mean hour as well as oclock. To be able to translate correctly the French phrase une messe de neuf heures, you have to know that a Catholic mass lasting nine hours is extremely improbable, so that the translation is a nine oclock mass, and not a nine hour mass. Since the linguistic structure is exactly the same in un voyage de neuf heures, which means a nine hour journey, only knowledge of the average duration of a mass can help the translator decide. Awareness that a problem exists. When you become a professional translator, the chief development that occurs in you during your first three or four years consists in becoming aware of problems that you had no idea could exist. If you are transferred to another organization, the whole process will start anew for a few years because the new field implies new problems that are just as hidden as in your former job. Some people may know that in the history of international communication there was an organization called International Auxiliary Language Association. Well, if you ask people how they understand that title, you will realize that, for a number of them, it means international association dealing with an auxiliary language, whereas for others it means an association studying the question of an international auxiliary language. The interesting point lies not so much in the ambiguity as in the fact that most people are not aware of it. When exposed to the phrase, they immediately understand it in a certain way and they are not at all conscious that the very same words are susceptible to another interpretation and that their immediate comprehension does not necessarily reflect what the author had in mind. Similarly, most junior translators simply do not imagine that the words English teacher usually designate, not a teacher who happens to be a British citizen, but somebody who teaches English and can be Japanese or Brazilian as well from any English speaking country.. Taking into account the various levels of context. The English word repression has two conventional translations in French. In politics, the French equivalent is repression, whereas in psychology, it is refoulement. You might believe at first glance that translating it correctly is simply a matter of knowing to what field your text belongs. If it deals with politics, you use one translation, if with psychology another. Reality is not that simple. Your author may use the psychological sense within a broad political context. For instance, in an article dealing with the Stalin era, you may have a sentence beginning with Repression by the population of its spontaneous critical reactions led to In this case, although the text deals with politics, the sentence deals with psychology. The narrow context is at variance with the broad context. Flexibility Besides judgment, the other quality I mentioned as indispensable to make an acceptable international translator is flexibility. This refers to the gymnastics aspect of translation work. Mastering the specialized field and the two relevant languages is not enough, you have to master the art of constantly jumping from one into the other and back. Languages are more than intellectual structures. They are universes. Each language has a certain atmosphere, a style of its own, that differentiates it from all others. If you compare such English expressions as software and, on a road sign, soft shoulder with their French equivalents, you realize that there is a very definite switch in the approach to communication. The French translations are respectively logiciel and accotements non stabilises. The English phrases are concrete, metaphorical, made up, with a zest of humor, from words used in everyday speech, although this does not contribute to better comprehension: knowing the meaning of soft and of shoulder does not help you to understand what a soft shoulder is. In French, the same meanings are conveyed by abstract and descriptive terms, which do not belong to everyday usage. You dont understand them either, but for a different reason: because they are based on too intellectual, too sophisticated, too unusual morphemes, so that most foreigners have to look up the words in dictionaries. The difficulty lies in the fact that this difference in approach has to be taken into account at the level, not only of words (a good dictionary may often solve that problem), but of sentences. Consider the sentence Private education is in no way under the jurisdiction of the government. It includes mostly English words of French origin, but common etymology does not imply a common way of expressing ones thoughts. In this case, a good French rendering would be Lenseignement libre ne releve en rien de lEtat. You will realize the importance of those differences in the approach to communication if you take the French sentence as the original and translate it literally into English. The result would be Free teaching does not depend in any way from the State, which means something quite different, especially to an American. In order to translate properly, you have to feel when and how to switch from one atmosphere to another. The problem is that with languages, you never know how you know what you know. If, in a text dealing with economic matters, a good translator meets the phrase the life expectancy of those capital goods, he knows because he feels that he has to translate it by la longevite des equipements. He also knows that when that same text mentions the consumers life expectancy, hell have to say, in French, esperance de vie, because the author for a while deals with a demographic concept which is included in his economic reasoning. But how does he know he knows? He doesnt know. This ability to adjust to the various approaches to reality or fantasy embodied in the different languages, linked to an ability to pass constantly back and forth, is what is called flexibility. This is the quality which is the most difficult to find when you recruit translators. We can now approach the same field from a different angle, asking ourselves the question: what are the problems built-in in languages that make judgment and flexibility so important in translation work? They relate to the grammar and the semantics of both the source and the target languages. Grammar The more a language uses precise and clear-cut grammatical devices to express the relationships among words and, within a given word, its constitutive concepts, the easier the task for the translator. The worst source languages for translators are thus English and Chinese. A Chinese sentence like ta shi qunian shengde xiaohair can mean both he (or she) is a child who was born last year and it was last year that she gave birth to a child. In English similar ambiguities are constant. In International Labor Organization, the word international refers to organization, as shown in the official French wording: Organisation internationale du Travail. But in another UN specialized agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the word international is to be related with aviation, not with organization, as shown, again, by the French version: Organisation de laviation civile internationale (and not Organisation internationale de laviation civile). This is legally and politically important, because it means that the organization is competent only for flights that cross national boundaries. It is not an international organization that deals with all problems of non-military flying. However, since the linguistic structure is similar in both cases, no text analysis can help the translator; he has no linguistic means to decide which is which. He has to refer to the constitution of the relevant organization. Many mistakes made by professional translators result from the impossibility, in English, to assign an adjective to its noun through grammatical means. When a translator rendered Basic oral health survey methods by Methodologie des enquetes fondamentales sur letat de sante bucco-dentaire, he was mistaken in relating the word basic to survey, whereas it actually relates to methods, but he should be forgiven, because only familiarity with the subject enables the reader to understand what refers to what. The correct translation was Methodologie fondamentale applicable aux enquetes sur letat de sante bucco-dentaire. Toncias wife teaches translation to American students who come to Geneva for one year. A standard translation task she gives them includes the subtitle Short breathing exercises. Every year, half her class understands exercises in short breathing, whereas the real meaning is short exercises in deep breathing. The fact that native speakers of English so consistently make the same mistake, although the context provides all the necessary clues, its still a wonder. The fact that, in English, the endings -s, -ed and -ing have several grammatical functions often complicates matters. In the sentence He was sorting out food rations and chewing gum, it is impossible to know if the concerned individual was chewing gum while sorting out food rations, or if he was sorting out two kinds of supplies: food, and chewing gum. Semantics Problems caused by semantics are particularly difficult for human translators. They are of two kinds: (1) the problem is not apparent; (2) the problem is readily seen, but the solution either requires good judgment or does not exist. An example of the first category is provided by the phrase malaria therapy. Since malaria is a well known disease, and therapy means treatment, a translator not trained in medical matters will think that it means treatment of malaria. But the semantic field of therapy is not identical with that of treatment, although this is not apparent if you simply consult a dictionary (Websters defines therapy as treatment of a disease). It would be too long to explain here the differences, but the fact is that malaria therapy should be rendered, not by traitement du paludisme, but by impaludation therapeutique or paludotherapie , because it means that the malaria parasite is injected into the blood to elicit a febrile reaction designed to cure the attacked disease, which is not malaria. In other words, it means treatment by malaria and not treatment of malaria. In the French version, published by Albin Michel, of Hammond Innes novel Levkas Man, one of the characters complains about les jungles concretes in which an enormous population has to live (Hammond, 1998, p.82). This does not make sense for the French reader. What the author meant by concrete jungles was jungles de beton, i. e. high-rise housing developments made of concrete. This is a case in which the translator was not aware of the existence of a semantic problem, namely that concrete has two completely unrelated meanings: a building material, and the opposite of abstract. An example of a semantic problem requiring good judgment is the word develop. It has such a wide semantic field that it is often a real nightmare for translators. It can mean setting up, creating, designing, establishing and thus refer to something that did not exist before. It can mean intensifying, accelerating, extending, amplifying, and thus express the concept making larger, which implies that the thing being developed has been concretely in existence for some time. But it can also mean tapping the resources, exploiting, in other words making use of something that has been having a latent or potential existence. In all other languages, the translation will vary according to the meaning, i. e.to that particular segment the author had in view within the very wide semantic field covered by the word. To know how to translate to develop such or such an industry, you have to know if the said industry already exists or not in the area your text is covering. In most cases, the text itself gives no clue on that matter. Only the translators general culture or his ability to do appropriate research can lead him to the right translation. Such a simple word as more can pose problems, because its semantic area covers both the concepts of quantity and of qualitative degree. What does more accurate information mean? Does it mean a larger amount of accurate information or information that has greater accuracy? And how can you translate cute into another language? The concept simply does not exist in most. Conversely, the French word frileux has no equivalent in English, so that a simple French sentence like il est frileux cannot be properly translated. Still, you can say he feels the cold terribly or he is very sensitive to cold. Although those are poor renderings, they are acceptable. What most resists translation is the adverbial form: frileusement. How can you translate il ramena frileusement la couverture sur ses genoux? You have to say something like He put the blanket back onto his knees with the kind of shivering movement typical of people particularly sensitive to cold. To those of you who might think that this is literary translation, something outside your field of research, I have to emphasize that descriptions of attitudes and behavior are an integral part of medical and psychological case presentations, so that the above sentence should not be considered unusual in a translators practice. An enormous amount of words, many of them appearing constantly in ordinary texts, present similar difficulties. Such words as commodity, consolidation, core, crop, disposal, to duck, emphasis, estate, evidence, feature, flow, forward, format, insight, issue, joint, junior, kit, maintain, matching, predicament, procurement and hundreds of others are quite easy to understand, but no French word has the same semantic field, so that their translation is always a headache. Dictionaries dont help, because they give you a few translations that never coincide with the concept as actually used in a text; in most cases the translations they suggest do not fit with the given context. Another case in point is provided by the many words that refer to the organization of life. You cannot translate Swiss Government by Gouvernement suisse, because the French word gouvernement has a much narrower meaning than the English one. In French, you have to say le Conseil federal or la Confederation suisse according to the precise meaning. The French word gouvernement designates what in English is often named cabinet. The English word government is one of the frustrating ones. You may render it by lEtat, les pouvoirs publics, les autorites, le regime or similar words, evaluating in each case what is closest to the English meaning, and you have to bear in mind that at times it should be sciences politiques (for instance in the sentence she majored in government, in which the verb major is another headache, because American studies are organized in quite a different way from studies in French speaking countries). The Russian word dispanserizacija illustrates a similar problem. It designates a whole conception of public health services that has no equivalent in Western countries. If you want your reader to understand your translation, you should, rather than translate it (it would be easy enough to say dispensarisation), explain what it means. Conclusion As you see, each one of the problems mentioned in the paper makes the translators task very arduous indeed. Problems caused by ambiguities, unexpressed but implied meanings, and semantic values without equivalent in the target language require a lot of thinking, a special knowledge of the field and a certain amount of research as for instance when you have to find out if an industry being developed already exists or not, or if secretary Tan Buting is a male or a female, which, in many languages, will govern the correct form of the adjectives and even the translation of  secretary (Sekreter? Sekreterin? ) . Such problems take up 80 to 90% of a professional translators time. A translator is essentially a detective, Toncia uses to say, and it is true. He has to make a lot of phone calls, to go from one library to another (not so much to find a technical term as to understand how a process unfolds or to find basic data that are understood, and thus unexpressed, among specialists) and to tap all his resources in deduction. These days we all seem to take the right of being a professional translator, but on closer look things are not so simple. In the international environment today, proper communication has become extremely important, and seemingly insignificant mistakes could cause a lot of trouble for the parties involved. In cases when proficient translation or interpreting is required, saving money by hiring someone from your staff instead of a competent professional is not a choice I would recommend. Bibliography Hammond , I. , 1998 Levkas Man, William Collins Larousse, 1994 Dictionaire de la langue fracaise, Lexis Philip, B. , 2000 Websters Third New International Dictionary, Webster Inc. Websites www. iti. org. uk- Institute or Translating and Interpreting http://www. naati. com. au- National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters.