By Kevin Hendzel
Subject-matter knowledge is not just “important” to
translation. It’s the very essence of translation.
Buried deep in the bedrock of every
profession are certain truths that are universally understood and accepted by
modern practitioners. In medicine, for example, those include a recognition
that the human body exists in a physical universe subject to the laws of
science and not to a fictitious universe of mysterious spirits accessible to
the chosen, pre-ordained few, a concept that had dominated human medicine for
millennia.
As a result, medical doctors strolling
through a cocktail party today would never encounter questions from their
friends, patients or colleagues about the effectiveness of specific spells,
incantations or charms in their medical practice. Mysticism and superstition in
medicine have been duly and effectively discarded in the proverbial dustbin of
history.
Not so for translation.We translators can spend decades of rigorous effort in the lead-up to our translation careers – and certainly during such careers – developing the crucial subject-matter expertise essential to the translation enterprise.
This process involves learning highly complex concepts in science, technology, philosophy, law, finance, business, music and dozens of other fields through immersion in the lab, lecture hall, classroom, production line, fabrication plant, trading floor or boardroom.
This prolonged effort is crucial to our ability to precisely convey all these concepts across language barriers.
But no matter how many fields we master as translators, awaiting us at that same cocktail party will be the eternal question that has been asked of translators since the Tower of Babel:
“How many languages do you speak?”
It’s a question that suggests an innocent, almost whimsical notion of translation as a low-stress career of light reflection, picked up effortlessly while flipping through phrase books and sipping sweet tea in the afternoon shade.
The reality is rather more sobering. In my case, for example, I’d arrive at such parties after having worked out certain issues in my translation work such as the principles underlying optical excitation of Rayleigh waves by interband light absorption or coherent acoustic resistance to an electron-hole plasma or approaches to calculating the electronic structure of alloys.
So my response to this friendly question of “how many languages do you speak?” would be a bit playful and would always be delivered with a smile:
“I speak science.”
Words or ideas?
It’s not the fault of our polite party-goer
asking the “how many languages” question, since it’s just an attempt to strike
up a friendly conversation.
And there’s no help from our culture,
either – especially in the U.S. – where translators are looked upon with deep
suspicion as these bizarre mythological creatures of ambiguous progeny whose
field of endeavor is certainly trivial and should have been rendered mute by
automated translation decades ago.At the core of this fallacy is the ancient and somewhat quaint notion that translation is just about language – about words.
This can’t be true, though, because
language itself isn’t even about words. The words of language are just the
symbols we manipulate to paint meaning into our world — to project pictures
that convey the underlying message, concept or idea.
So translators do not translate languages
or words. They translate ideas.
And in today’s commercial translation
market, that means we translate the ideas of people who are deeply invested in
some highly complicated activities and are willing to pay us to convey them.
Since we must understand those ideas to do
this accurately, we must know not only what we know, but we must also know what
they know, too.A solitary focus on language
What happens if a translator understands
the languages, but not the ideas? How do those translations work out in the
real world?
Short answer: Catastrophically.
The translation world today appears to be
overflowing with novice (but certainly well-meaning) translators flailing about
in dangerous waters infested with their own conceptual blindness. This is an
inevitable outcome of the persistent and wrongheaded solitary focus on language
to the exclusion of content.
It’s why students entering translation
studies programs would be well advised to learn a great deal about the world
before attempting to investigate ways to convey that knowledge – which is
exactly what translation is – lest they end up conveying a disturbing and very
costly lack of knowledge, an outcome that embarrasses both the novice
translator and the poor unsuspecting client who, after all, thinks translation
is just a matter of “speaking a foreign language.”Russian has no words for that
One of my favorite stories that nicely
illustrates this dilemma originated in an inquiry we once received from a U.S.
manufacturer of a water purification system based on a novel yet
straightforward technology that they wished to sell in Russia. The company had
hired a translator – a Russian woman – to translate their technical
documentation from English into Russian. They were getting nowhere with this
approach and called me up to see if I could determine why.
“Every time we give her documentation to
translate she says ‘Russian has no words for any of that,’” the manager told
me. “Then she gets on the phone and speaks Russian all day with her friends. I
don’t understand how she can speak that much Russian and not be able to
translate what we need her to,” he said. “Is it true that Russian has no words
for water purification?”I assured him that Russian has a highly sophisticated technical lexicon, and in any event, it was unlikely that the language of Mendeleev – the author of the Periodic Table of Elements, after all – would prove utterly helpless in the face of reverse osmosis.
It was certainly possible that this woman was simply unaware of the technology (or was feigning ignorance of it), but in practice her apparent complete lack of any technical awareness was derailing the company’s efforts for reasons having nothing to do with language.
Line or link?
A more problematic case are translations
that describe a world that doesn’t, can’t or will never exist.
And that happens because the translator
doesn’t have the real-world knowledge to know what doesn’t, can’t or will never
exist.There are countless thousands of examples of this phenomenon. One is the word “liniya” in Russian, which means a physical telephone line such as a hard-wired copper landline. Unfortunately, the exact same Russian word also means a radio link to a remote terminal, satellite or cell tower, which is what cellphones use.
The only way to know which is correct is to possess the most rudimentary knowledge of telecommunications.
Alas, there never seems to be a limit to the English translations of this word that describe a world in which a physical copper wire is magically soldered to a satellite orbiting at an altitude of 42,000 kilometers.
Endless challenges
It’s certainly true that even the most
experienced, careful and knowledgeable translators will find themselves in
uncertain subject-matter territory at various points throughout their careers.
It’s one of the many reasons to involve an expert colleague with greater
subject-matter expertise in the review process while getting up to speed on
technical concepts – a process that can and does take years.
Final appeal
In the event that I’ve failed to be
convincing up to this point, consider again the title of this blog post:
Translation is not about words. It’s about
what the words are about.
The message here is that translation is
about meaning, not about words. To illustrate this idea, I use the same words
in both sentences.
The only reason the meaning conveys is that
the sentences are in different frames of reference. It’s the meaning underlying
those frames of reference that delivers the idea.
Reposted with permission from http://www.kevinhendzel.com/
Wonderful piece, Kevin. I answered the 'what languages do you speak' question in the usual manner this weekend, then later was kicking myself, thinking I should have tried the science line. :)
ReplyDeleteGreat post, Kevin! So true. I gave up trying to explain what translation is really about at parties a long time ago!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind words, Karen. Another advantage of the "I speak science" opening is that it often helps avoid the "friend's daughter who did a semester in Paris" detours from the other person -- who is trying desperately to just be polite -- and those often end up simply deflating into nothing. It's so much more refreshing and interesting to go the science route. :)
ReplyDelete