Becoming a Translator

An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367227326
• eBook ISBN: 9781000763539
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Fusing theory with advice and information about the practicalities of translating, Becoming a Translator is the essential resource for novice and practicing translators. The book explains how the market works, helps translators learn how to translate faster and more accurately, as well as providing invaluable advice and tips about how to deal with potential problems, such as stress.

The fourth edition has been revised and updated throughout, offering:

• a whole new chapter on multimedia translation, with a discussion of the move from "intersemiotic translation" to "audiovisual translation," "media access" and "accessibility studies"
• new sections on cognitive translation studies, translation technology, online translator communities, crowd-sourced translation, and online ethnography
• "tweetstorms" capturing the best advice from top industry professionals on Twitter
• student voices, especially from Greater China

Including suggestions for discussion, activities, and hints for the teaching of translation, and drawing on detailed advice from top translation professionals, the fourth edition of Becoming a Translator remains invaluable for students and teachers of Translation Studies, as well as those working in the field of translation.

1
External knowledge

The user’s view

• Internal and external knowledge
• Reliability
• Textual reliability
• The translator’s reliability
• Timeliness
• Cost
• Conclusion
• Discussion
• Exercises
• Suggestions for further reading

IN THIS CHAPTER: Translation can be perceived from the outside, from the client’s or other user’s point of view, or from the inside, from the translator’s point of view; and while this book mainly takes the translator’s perspective, it is useful to begin with a sense of what our clients and users need and why. Not only are our clients “nontranslators with money” (the source of our income); a highly simplified version of their demands (equivalence) has formed the basis for most prescriptive approaches to translation, and it’s good to identify those approaches as grounded in clients’ expectations.

Internal and external knowledge

Translation is different things for different groups of people. For people who are not translators, it is primarily a text; for people who are, it is primarily an activity. Or, as Anthony Pym (1993: 131, 149–50) puts it, from the perspective of “external knowledge” (the knowledge of nontranslators) translation is a text; from the perspective of “internal knowledge” (translators) translation is an activity that aims at the production of a text.

From the translator’s internal perspective, the activity is most important: the process of becoming a translator, receiving and handling requests to do specific translations, doing research, networking, translating words, phrases, and registers, editing the translation, delivering the finished text to the employer or client, billing the client for work completed, getting paid. The text is an important part of that process, of course – even, perhaps, the most important part – but it is never the whole thing. From the non-translator’s external perspective, the text as product or commodity is most important. And while this book is primarily concerned with (and certainly written from and for) the translator’s internal knowledge, and thus with the activity of translating – it is, after all, a textbook for student translators – it will be useful to explore the complexities of an external perspective briefly here in Chapter 1, if only to distinguish it clearly from the more translator-oriented approach of the rest of the book. A great deal of thinking and teaching about translation in the past has been controlled by what is essentially external knowledge, text-oriented approaches that one might have thought of greater interest to nontranslators than translators – so much, in fact, that these external perspectives have in many ways come to dominate the field.

Internal	External
A translator thinks and talks about translation from inside the process, knowing how it's done, possessing a practical real-world sense of the problems involved, some solutions to those problems, and the limitations on those solutions (the translator knows, for example, that no translation will ever be a perfectly reliable guide to the original).	A nontranslator (especially a monolingual reader in the target language who directly or indirectly pays for the translation - a client, a book-buyer) thinks and talks about translation from outside the process, not knowing how it's done but knowing, as Samuel Johnson once said of the non-carpenter, a well-made cabinet when s/he sees one.

Ironically enough, traditional approaches to translation based on the nontranslating user’s need for a certain kind of text have only tended to focus on one of the user’s needs: reliability (often called “equivalence” or “fidelity”). A fully user-oriented approach to translation would recognize that timeliness and cost are equally important factors. Let us consider these three aspects of translation as perceived from the outside – translation users’ desire to have a text translated reliably, rapidly, and cheaply – in turn.

Reliability

Translation users need to be able to rely on translation. They need to be able to use the translation as a reliable basis for action, in the sense that if they take action on the belief that the translation gives them the kind of information they need about the original, that action will not fail because of the translation. And they need to be able to trust the translator to act in reliable ways, delivering reliable translations by deadlines, getting whatever help is needed to meet those deadlines, and being flexible and versatile in serving the user’s needs. Let’s look at these two aspects of translation reliability separately.

Textual reliability

A text’s reliability consists in the trust a user can place in it, or encourage others to place in it, as a representation or reproduction of the original. To put that differently, a text’s reliability consists in the user’s willingness to base future actions on an assumed relation between the original and the translation.

For example, if the translation is of a tender, the user is most likely the company to which the tender has been made. “Reliability” in this case would mean that the translation accurately represents the exact nature of the tender; what the company needs from the translation is a reliable basis for action, i.e., a rendition that meticulously details every aspect of the tender that is relevant to deciding whether to accept it. If the translation is done in-house, or if the client gives an agency or freelancer specific instructions, the translator may be in a position to summarize certain paragraphs of lesser importance, while doing painstakingly close readings of certain other paragraphs of key importance.

Or again, if the translation is of a literary classic, the user may be a teacher or student in a class that is reading and discussing the text. If the class is taught in a mother-tongue or world-literature department, “reliability” may mean that the users agree to act as if the translation really were the original text. For this purpose a translation that reads as if it had originally been written in the target language will probably suffice. If the class is an upper-division or graduate course taught in a modern-language, comparative literature, or classics department, “reliability” may mean that the translation follows the exact syntactic contours of the original, and thus helps students to read a difficult text in a foreign language. For this purpose, various “cribs” or “interlinears” are best – like those New Testament translations published for the benefit of seminary students of Greek who want to follow the original Greek text word for word, with the translation of each word printed directly under the word it renders.

Or if the translation is of advertising copy, the user may be the marketing department in the mother company or a local dealer, both of whom will presumably expect the translation “reliably” to sell products or services without making impossible or implausible or illegal claims; or it may be prospective customers, who may expect the translation to represent the product or service advertised reliably, in the sense that, if they should purchase one, they would not feel that the translation had misrepresented the actual service or product obtained.

As we saw earlier, this discussion of a text’s reliability is venturing into the territory traditionally called “accuracy” or “equivalence” or “fidelity.” These terms are in fact shorthand for a wide variety of reliabilities that govern the user’s external perspectives on translation. There are many different types of textual reliability; there is no single touchstone for a reliable translation, certainly no single simple formula for abstract semantic (let alone syntactic) “equivalence” that can be applied easily and unproblematically in every case. All that matters to the nontranslating user is that the translation be reliable in more or less the way s/he expects (sometimes unconsciously): accurate or effective or some combination of the two; painfully literal or easily readable in the target language or somewhere in the middle; reliable for her or his specific purposes.

A text that meets those demands will be called a “good” or “successful” translation, period, even if another user, with different expectations, might consider it bad or unsuccessful; a text considered a failure by some users, because it doesn’t meet their reliability needs, might well be hailed as brilliant, innovative, sensitive, or highly accurate by others.

It is perhaps unfortunate, but probably inevitable, that the norms and standards appropriate for one group of users or use situations should be generalized to apply to all. Because some users demand literal translations, for example, the idea spreads that a translation that is not literal is no translation at all; and because some users demand semantic (sense-for-sense) equivalence, the idea spreads that a translation that charts its own semantic path is no translation at all.

Thus a free retelling of a children’s classic may be classified as an “adaptation” rather than a translation; and an advertising translation that deviates strikingly from the original in order to have the desired impact on target readers or viewers (i.e., selling products or services) may be thought of as a “new text” rather than as an advertising translation.

Each translation user, limited to the perspective of her or his own situational needs, may quite casually fall into the belief that those needs aren’t situational at all, indeed aren’t her or his needs at all, but simply the nature of translation itself. All translation is thus-and-such – because this translation needs to be, and how different can different translations be? The fact that they can be very different indeed is often lost on users who believe their own expectations to be the same as everyone else’s.

This mistaken belief is almost certainly the source of the quite widespread notion that “fidelity,” in the sense of an exact one-to-one correspondence between original and translation, is the only goal of translation. The notion arises when translation is thought of exclusively as a product or commodity (rather than as an activity or process), and when the reliability of that product is thought of narrowly in terms of exact correspondence between texts (rather than situated pragmatic reliability).

Reliably translated texts cover a wide range from the lightly edited to the substantially rewritten, with the “accurate” or “faithful” translation somewhere in the middle; there is no room in the world of professional translation for the theoretical stance that only straight sense-for-sense translation is translation, therefore as a translator I should never be expected to edit, summarize, annotate, or re-create a text.

While some effort at user education is probably worthwhile, it is usually easier for translators simply to shift gears, find out (or figure out) what the user wants or needs or expects, and provide that – without attempting to enlighten the user about the variability and volatility of such expectations. Many times clients’ demands are unreasonable, unrealistic, even impossible – as when the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the fourth edition
• Introduction
• 1 External knowledge: the user’s view
• 2 Internal knowledge: the translator’s view
• 3 The process of translation
• 4 Drawing on experience: how being a translator is more than just being good at languages
• 5 Starting with people: social interaction as the first key focus of translators’ experience of the world
• 6 Working with people: the workplace as the interactive setting for specialized terminologies
• 7 Translation as an operation performed in and on languages
• 8 Translation as an operation performed in and on multimedia
• 9 Working and understanding through social networks
• 10 The impact on translation of culture(s)
• 11 When habit fails
• References
• Index