June 8, 2008
Translation is a craft
The yndigo blog asks whether translation is an art or a science. I say it's neither: it's a craft. But this has been discussed before.
yndigo also asks,
To what extent can these choices be measured as objectively better or worse? How much constraint or freedom does the translator have? What types of source documents (law, patents, advertising, literature) afford the translator the most creativity?
The short answer is, it depends. :)
In general, my aim is to create the same effect in the translation as in the original. If the original is clear and easy to understand, I haven't done my job if my translation is hard or even nearly impossible to understand.
As a technical translator, I get to have a rather simplistic view of it. I look at my source text as a cake recipe. If someone can follow my translated recipe and produce the same cake in the same amount of time, then my translation is correct. And that's pretty much where the technical translator's job ends, in my opinion.
That's really the job of all translators though, isn't it? At IJET-19 I had the pleasure of speaking with Peter McMillan, whose translation of the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu has recently been published. He told me that his goal of translating poetry is to evoke the same emotional response as the original. A bit more tenuous than a cake, but the same goal.
But maybe the tastes of your target audience are different. Americans, for example, tend to like sweeter cakes than the Japanese. They also tend to like bigger portions. Should I adjust the recipe to make the cake just as tasty for American eaters as Japanese eaters? Yes, sometimes. But this is where the work veers away from translation and into something else, however you want to define it (copy editing, localization, …).
Sometimes, most of the time, you're just called on to duplicate the recipe. Once in a while, they want you to change it to use bittersweet chocolate instead of bitter, or extend the recipe to serve 8 instead of 5. That's also a fine goal of translation — just make sure you get paid for it and that you're up to the task.
But if you're given a recipe for peach pie and you come back with a recipe for cow pies, you probably haven't done your job.
And whichever way you go, make sure it's what your customer wants!
Ryan,
Thank you for picking up my thread! I like your baking analogy; having tried to use foreign cookbooks with little success, I can see that the technical translator still has his work cut out for him.
Although translation may not be classified as a science, it’s ironic that [computer] scientists seem to be monopolizing the future of translation as they try to break the machine translation code.
As far as craft is concerned, it may be easier for some fields of translation to draw parallels with the crafts listed in the wikipedia link you gave (pottery, glass blowing, metal working), but I wouldn’t describe others as crafts, which I would define as the mastery of certain tools to achieve a product known in advance.
Gregory Rabassa claims translation is a teachable art (I confess I haven’t read his book to know exactly what he means by that). Wikepedia’s entry on Art says that there is no real agreement on what art is but that it is generally a “(product of) human activity, made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind.”
Not having done it, I would tend to say that literary translation offers the most creativity, thus one could argue that the literary translator has a part in creating the work too, and is thus an artist. Others may argue that literary translators have the least freedom and are constrained by rhythm, rhyme, tone, metaphor, etc.
I wonder if the transubstantiation blog wants to weigh in on this. He always offers lots of insights on translation theory.
Anyway, thanks for all the great posts.
Glenn
It ALWAYS depends which therefore disqualifies this as a reliable answer. It may be dangerous to make sweeping generalisations about the propensity for creativity in particular areas, however, a discussion on creativity is itself worthwhile, for example, here: http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/creative-translation/
What may be helpful is to link the kinds of translation equivalence that match each field. See here:
http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/translation-equivalence/
Certain types of text value pragmatic equivalence, for example, over other textual equivalence and focusing on this might be a good starting point.
@Glenn
Richard Thieme has a great article arguing that translators aren’t professionals, we’re craftsmen (which I guess I’d call “artisans” to remain gender neutral).
Again, I’m pretty simple-minded about these things. The guy who painted the Mona Lisa was an artist. The guy who restored it was an artisan. Translation of art can itself be art insofar as the translator must create something new in order to achieve the same effect. Translation of users’ manuals for widget crank assemblies…
@Zak
Point well taken about it depending. It all depends on what the clients want (what they think they want and what they really want), as well as how much they’re willing to pay you and whether you can deliver the goods.
Ryan,
Thanks for the reply. I just read Thieme’s article and agree with much of it. As a legal transator though, I disagreed with his assertion that, “[a]s craftsmen our clients have the final say in the product” and I don’t think legal translators would be the only ones to disagree with it.
The translator-client relationship is different for each field. I would say that in advertising, so what if the source and translation don’t match; in the end the point is to sell.
The relationship of a translator to an attorney is naturally more adversarial and the translator must make choices out of professional integrity based on accuracy, no matter how much the client might want to bend the meaning to advance his side of things. Which is why legal translators so often sign certificates of accuracy.
Anyway, thanks for continuing this discussion; it inspires me to write a post about how audience informs philosophy and approach.
Glenn
Hi Glenn:
Yes, the field you’re in can certainly affect your approach to translation! I imagine legal translation is a good example where the “recipe” analogy falls down, because legal systems differ so much between countries. Luckily for me, a depth-first tree traversal is the same in Japanese and English :)
There are times when some adaptation is needed in my translations, especially when the original talks about handling Japanese text, but by and large the concepts are the same.