HOW LONG DOES ONE’S REPUTATION AS A “MASTER LINGUIST” – AND A TRANSLATOR IS A “MASTER LINGUIST” AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED – USUALLY LAST IN OTHERS’ EYES? I wonder if this comment is going to give succour to my business competitors more than anything else, but I’m going to post it anyway… Could I be the perfect translator? …Let me make it clear that by that I specifically mean, “Could I ever become the perfect translator?” (if there is any such thing as a perfect translator) as opposed to “Could I actually be the perfect translator – be the embodiment of everything that makes the perfect translator? Like, if anyone is the perfect translator, it’s me?” Now, like many people, I just know damn well that many people, when on holiday in a foreign country, have felt chuffed when doing something like ordering a meal in the local language; but surely no-one could be too ignorant to know that fully-fledged translation – especially professional translation! – is a whole different ball game. For a start, there’s more reason to be on guard against… well, being caught off guard – after all, the “general scope of what happens” is rather limited when you’re doing something like enjoying something in a restaurant compared to what it is when you are, say, a police officer trying to follow orders to quell a public riot, isn’t it? In the domain of translation, if it’s not quite properly hearing what the native speaker has said then it’s… you beat me to it, didn’t you? Comprehending the proper meaning. I have a question for you: who do you think is more likely to use words in your native language that you are not familiar with when they are speaking to you in it: a highly educated person who is a mother tongue speaker of your native language or someone who is highly educated whose mother tongue is something other than your native language but who has a reasonable-to-respectable command of your native language? Why don’t you think about that one? What opportunities are there for improving oneself as a translator? Broadening one’s vocabulary in the foreign language that you translate from (and that would include the various meanings attributed to certain expressions) is all very well and good, but that’s not without its limitations. This is the most obvious example of this argument in my eyes: personally, I do wonder how people could ever hope to learn of idioms in a foreign language that are like “it’s raining cats and dogs” in English, before the Internet came along. The French sentence “Il a filé à langlaise dans le plus simple appareil à notre nez et à notre barbe parce quil était beurré et nous cherchions la petite bête en lui balançant une vanne.” is not supposed to mean “He span at the English in the plainest camera at our nose and our beard because he was buttered and we were looking for the little beast in swinging him a sluice.” (even if that is an exaggerated example). How about you try this: the next time you’re listening to a foreign language, do your best to comprehend when idioms like this start and finish, if you can. No, what I’m claiming is that – and I believe I might have already hinted at this in my last comment, when I started talking about the Matrix – however sad it might seem to some, there is no hope of becoming/being a translator worth the name by improving one’s knowledge/aptitude of theory fare alone. You could say I look for opportunities to improve myself as a translator – maybe even an interpreter one day – in just about anything. A case in point: in this video youtube/watch?v=7LQBzZ89OaI someone has tried to imagine what English words the spoken German you hear most sounds like, nonsense factor and all. Like virtually all people with an at least adequate knowledge of German, I can make out what some of the spoken German words in this clip are even without the (proper i.e. actual) English subtitles of the film in which it is found; some of it I am able to pick up but only with the help of them; and some of it I can’t pick up even with them. If you speak German, it can be hard to, shall we say, appreciate this video as much as those who don’t speak German do. I mean, the first time I saw it, even if I did read the subtitles I just didn’t… hear the non-existent English that they were supposed to represent, precisely because of the fact that I could make out (to a certain extent) the German words spoken between the characters. But I watched it again and again until I could start hearing the non-existent English that the characters were speaking… at which point it became harder for me to pick up the German that was being spoken – I suppose I should have seen that coming really, shouldn’t I? But I have been playing with the idea that something like this could be a “real” (for lack of a better word) translator/interpreter training exercise which goes beyond all the theoretical fare: to have the candidate watch videos of people speaking German but which have English subtitles standing for something that doesn’t exist; the candidate, given their exposure to these subtitles, will as such have their focus TRULY tested as to what they can pick out within the foreign language that is being spoken and render it in another language accordingly.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 10:46:46 +0000
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