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

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.

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