Art envy

I recently read an article about Picasso’s Blue Period by American art critic Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post March 31, 2022 issue. Not impressed with his interpretation of Picasso’s mindset regarding his paintings during this period, I read a bit more about it in a Spanish website. Jesús Zatón‘s commentaries (in Spanish) seemed more comprehensive and better documented. Two thoughts: either the first critic is monolingual and hasn’t read previous reviews of Picasso’s blue period in Spanish (or Catalan) or he prefers to offer his own opinionated take on the subject.

A third thought tugged at me: Do I wish I painted such pieces like Picasso? I don’t even know how to paint, but I admire his skill. I had the pleasure of visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona a few years back, which gave me time to consider what his skills expressed. Since I am no painter, I have no desire to envy Picasso. However, there’s an overlap between admiring a painter, a composer, an singer, etc. and feeling a certain degree of envy for their evident abilities. On the other hand, what translator hasn’t heard a nontranslator wish he or she could write in French, Polish or Spanish after seeing our work?

Is this mild-mannered envy we mix with admiration a character flaw? I think not, since that vibration between admiration and envy draws a path for our own desire for excellence, our own drive to achieve a degree of craftmanship as translators. One could take a piece of sculpted wood, a bust, and admire the artist’s attention to detail, how polished the piece is. All I have to admire is the product of the artist’s work, in the same way users read a poem or subtitles in their own language. The user can only discern the author, as if he were a ghost who left a distinctive imprint on the wood or the page.

The experience is different when we witness a musical performance. That’s why I feel more enriched when I see a live or video performance of a piano or orchestral recital; the artist (understood, he or she is interpreting the composer’s piece) moves his fingers across the keyboard or slides his arm over the cello as he glides the bow on the strings. Listening to the same work on CD, vinyl or a streaming platform is not the same, regardless of how beautiful the composition is. In fact, the composer’s brilliance in music is enhanced and complemented by the musician.

Since translators do not perform for an audience, do they still admire other translators? You bet. Many, many times in my career I wished, with a tinge of envy, I could have rendered that particular phrase so elegantly, and I look at my own attempt as insufficient, rough on the edges, forgettable output. Fear not, I don’t feel tormented by the shadows of better translations haunting me at night. Even an imperfect translation is its own reward in our solitary offices.

Picasso Museum, photo furtively taken in 2017.

We admire beauty and elegance in works of art and marvelous musical compositions, among other artistic expressions. Self-expression is not nearly enough to constitute beauty. That’s why excellence and craftsmanship are so central to works of art, the well-known and the unknown. To admire a translated text of any kind, the text has to be beautiful and elegant to some degree, besides fulfilling its utilitarian mission. If a text is only utilitarian or functional, bereft of a sliver of elegance or neatness, it doesn’t deserve much admiration, let alone envy. A translator only becomes a craftsman (or craftswoman) after realizing this truth.

Advertisement

A pandemic-driven normal

The days before the WHO declared a pandemic, I was, like many others, wishing it didn’t come to that. I wished it went the way other impending epidemics, like SARS and Zika virus, went: regional disasters that wouldn’t touch my world. Once the pandemic was declared, I hoped it would fizzle out in a few weeks, hoping against reality that this was just a flu variety, not a new disease. Denial, denial, denial.

Once local authorities started to impose stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, curtailing even the most inconsequential movement­­­­­­‒such as going to the store for a can of sardines you don’t need­­­­‒felt invasive. Most people started to buy more staples than they needed. Yes, I stocked up on toilet paper, disinfecting towelettes and alcohol gel like the rest of them. I started to feel imprisoned in my own container of life.

When the order came to work from home, my employer had already asked us to do just that a week before. My decades of experience as an independent translator showed me all I needed to do to be prepared. The transition was seamless. It took me 2-3 frantic hours of rummaging through my cubicle to grab what I needed: computer equipment, monitors, architectural books and dictionaries (I work at a CAD software firm), mugs, power cords. I settled into my work at home routine, first at a hotel as I was in the middle of a move, then at my new house. The traditional living room laid out by a spacious kitchen was comandeered as my home office: far more spacious indeed. Having all of my dictionaries and reference books, not just those given me at work, helped matters greatly. I’ll tell you why.

I’m an advocate of profusely reading something, anything, nothing and everything to do with the text to translate. My cubicle shelves were insufficient to hold all that I need to consult while at work. Roaming from the office to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea or heat up my prepared lunch was a welcome break from the task chair. Walking from my chair to a shelf holding a particular book or dictionary felt liberating. I felt indeed at ease; no distracting voices or conversations from some afar cubicle or from a nearby aisle. No bits of jarring conversation about code or sales or trips that stole my attention away from the text on my screen. And no need to put on my earphones to isolate myself into a musical coccoon of my own making, my ears swimming in notes while my eyes rowed through lines of text.

Amid my comfort, I could fully imagine what my life could’ve been had not I secured my current position in late 2018. The consequences were palpable: I would’ve added myself to the throngs of underemployed or underhired independent translators plying their trade against the increasing silence of nonresponsive customers or lost customers, many of whom are small operators or translation agencies whose own clients dwindled in number or simply disappeared. Government help for freelance professionals came right on time for some, too late for others and never for others even. I cannot begin to imagine their desperation at seeing their sources of income disappear or drop to a trickle, not enough to pay for day care, rent, medicines or other necessities. Comparisons, however, are a cruel luxury and don’t solve problems. Yet I felt fortunate enough. A year passed, I was more established in my position, secure under a steady roof, with plenty of food and toilet paper. I knew we were all paying the price of involuntary isolation: no more seeing our coworkers or associates, no more meeting in person for interviews, chats, classes and conferences. We started to climb a steep hill of expectations as vaccine work progressed and we began to see the light at the end of a long, solitary tunnel.

But a year or more of isolation takes its toll psychologically and socially. We are all changing and become changed because of this. That this is a historic moment, living, trudging, wading across our own world pandemic is no trite statement. We are awoken to new realities while deprived of our old ones. We need to talk about both kinds, mourn the permanent and temporal losses and tentatively contemplate our new gains, even if they don’t seem advantageous at first. For those who love to travel, being told not to is painful enough. Being unable to plan to travel is even more painful, I think. The operative word here is to plan.

We are so used to plan for everything, even if we don’t consider ourselves so methodical and asinine about the details. Just going shopping and getting lost in the aisles of our local supermarket was more than going shopping. It meant random encounters, unexpected purchases, welcome sights of colors, faces, frames and shapes. As ordinary and repetitive as these habits of ours may sound and be to ourselves, we needed them. In the best of scenarios, we would encounter a friend or relative and exchange a touch, a handshake, a hug, our eyes could talk even if we had no words to express. In the workplace or in a classroom, we’d think we were there just for the content, the new stuff to learn. How wrong we were! It turns out that zoomified meetings are filtering out all that is human. It’s not enough to see and smile at each other across screen (the glass cage, as Nicholas Carr puts it); we need to aprehend the fact, consciously and unconsciously, that we are in front of each other physically, that we can touch or not touch, see and not see. We are not just faces but embodied individuals who are members of a society and segments of that society: classroom, profession, workplace, picnic, dinner, playground.

While it is true that internet-enabled technologies, mobile phones and the like have allowed us to continue to work and resume our connectivity, we are slowly and painfully realizing that no amount of technology can substitute for the absences we have been suffering during this pandemic. We are becoming aware of how sterile and mechanical our conversations and interactions are becoming through the internet ether. We are also realizing that modern life is not just about apps, iPads, podcasts and Excel worksheets: we need to experience museums, street music, live concerts and theater, we need to smell the street odors, the scent of familial and stranger faces and bodies, our feet need to feel the pavement, the hardfloor, the carpet, the grass, the sand, the water underneath, our hands absolutely need to feel the air that circulates around our bodies, whether outside in a park or sidewalk, or inside in a coffeeshop. Our ears need the din of random conversations across the street and across the table. None of those things will come through technology but through our own selves when we step outside and engage others.

This engagement will come soon enough as pandemic conditions begin to improve in our cities and countries, but this return to engagement won’t come evenly or synchronically. I fear that some parts of the world will continue in chronic pandemic mode because they lack a robust health care system or enough vaccines, or because their economies are in tatters and will remain so for years to come. In a way, they’ll be relegated to a dusty and forlorn cubicle of humanity until better days come. But engaged we must all become if we want to live. Sometimes, the best connection is the low-tech type: I feel relieved when I talk to a friend or sibling over the phone, better than on FaceTime or via Zoom. Freed from the screen slavery, I can focus on pauses, voice cues to certain emotions, and the flow of words. Sometimes a sentence comes out more paused because it invites a counterargument or a comment; but sometimes the statement gushes out in a rush because its speaker needs to say his piece and I must discipline myself to listen more intently.

I’ve read sanguine comments about the future of telework from some LinkedIn posters. Zoom and computers forever, we can work from home wherever we call it home; we can still be more productive and innovative and we are better for it, as if digital nomads were our perennial calling. Yet this focus on productivity sounds, as ever, so much like assembly-line work, joyless work, busy work. My country, the United States of America, is noted for its large strides in worker productivity and professional productivity: faster is better, technology has all the answers. If life were that simple. I prefer to focus on meaningful, slower work, going back to the artisanal side of things. After all, how can I hope to reconnect with my fellow human beings if I become robotic and sterile as a PDF document? I’m afraid we translators are turning into a pretty joyless technobunch. Exhibit A: go to most loclunches or professional virtual meetings and the main talk is translation tools or some new technology marvel to work faster or more efficiently. There’s nary a word about the pleasure of finding the right expression or style without resorting to some technological crutch, like an app or website. We tend to regurgitate data, not converse; we declare others’ opinions from some blog as a proven and unassailable truth while eschewing actual debate of ideas. It is as if our half-cooked or parroted opinions have the veneer of authority if we only mention a technology or declare subservience to some technological marvel, like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. We don’t want to risk ridicule or unpopularity. We, professional, well educated translators, are sounding more like a convention of dunces, babbling about SEO words like innovation, creativity, productivity, customers, advancement but we keep it safe. That is, superficial. Ergo, superficial talk is safe talk.

To engage with another human being, as limited as we find ourselves under this pandemic to do, is to be able to talk to an actual or potential colleague or friend with all the attaining risks: risk of sounding stupid, risk of having our idea rejected offhand, risk of being unable to steer the conversation the way we want it. You know, talk with all our insecurities in sight, no so-called imposter syndrome or some other psychobabble excuse. I, for one, want to be able to resume such exchanges asking for nothing in return except for a human expression. Nothing more human than eye contact without the aid of screens.

Artistic sources to my craft

Translation is an individual craft to me, honed over years of practice. We usually say “experience” to lump together all the specializations and texts we’ve worked on, as well as all the types of media formats those texts were encased in. Ask the average translator on the street about the sources that feed her translation craft and she’ll probably say love of languages or an inclination to read foreign literature. The following is not intended to one up anyone’s sources of inspiration, however, but to share the aspects that have been feeding my work as a translator.

First, it’s the need to read from all available sources. I don’t limit myself to reading about the heart’s anatomy if I’m working on a heart disease document, nor do I feel my research is bounded by medical vocabulary alone. I would read an economics news, peruse over a text describing a weather phenomenon or let my mind wander around articles on capitalization, a new movie or threaded holes for mounting a piece of equipment. To the untrained eye, I’m wasting time reading nonmedical material, but that’s not how language works. Other texts inform my writing.

Love of orthography or correct spelling comes in second. One of the subjects in my elementary school in Callao, Peru was, unsurprisingly enough, Ortografía. Aiming for correct spelling in all my working languages is not some perfectionistic quirk. I care about the reader, the actual translation user—who is never the client, the project manager or the translator whose written work I’m editing. Plus, Spanish has what Nadeau and Barlow call the culture of language: native Spanish speakers aim for excellence in language usage, and the reader expects that, no matter his or her educational level. Therein lies a particular kind of aesthetic; besides, misspellings are like image artifacts: they detract from reading comprehension and knowledge acquisition.

Journal writing, which I started at age 12, comes third. I’ve kept all my journals from my teen years and my young adult years as well. Translation is an act of communicative writing; it follows that one needs to excel at writing in order to excel at translation, and good writing precedes good translation by years of diligent preparation. Naturally, I had just basic knowledge of the Spanish language when I was 12, but I already knew all of 23 Spanish prepositions and the couple dozen verb tenses, and how to use the subjunctive. My first journal entries weren’t publish-ready nor polished writing, and they were rather descriptive and mostly pedestrian: things I did from day to day. It was much later that I developed the skills to describe states of mind, feelings, complex facts, my friends’ personality traits and so on. But journal writing is just one way to exercise ourselves in writing. Your way could be poetry or storytelling, or something else altogether. The point is that a translator is an early or precocious writer.

Music, so much its own universal language, is a fourth influence. Although I do not play an instrument right now, I’ve been inevitably drawn to instrumental performances—Camerata Bariloche and other orchestral groups in my native Córdoba, Argentina. Writing and music composition share some concepts: phrasing, cadence, leitmotif, euphony. I did a bit of baritone tenor singing for eight years in lieu of playing an instrument, which satisfied my eagerness for having music in my life and for sharing it.

But what’s the parallel of music and translation? As with all good writing, a well-crafted translation is euphonic and is highly legible. A translation should be precise, elegant and purposeful in order for its user to find it useful and acquire the requisite knowledge. But let’s not confuse precision with elaboration. Ideally, a well-crafted translation is devoid of ambiguity and clunky syntax. For a song or an instrumental piece to be properly enjoyed, it cannot be just rough cuts or approximations. Likewise, producing a “sufficiently understandable” translation (the province of MT and NMT) is not enough. Sadly, the current culture of speed is working against yielding proper translations.

Calligraphy, a fifth artistic aspect, has exerted a powerful influence on my work. This was a subject I took for two years at a business high school in Córdoba, Argentina. Why calligraphy? Because it was considered essential to learn to write ledger entries with good penmanship. We learned to write in gothic and italics with nib and ink. I would rediscover calligraphy decades later when I started to study and perform desktop publishing for my clients.

In Spanish, we have a saying, to do something con buena letra, that is, slowly and carefully, or to behave in a proper manner. Translators prefer to rewrite a previous translation for a client because (a) it’s less expensive than editing it and (b) the resulting output is fresher and cleaner in writing, not a reinterpretation of what another translator did. So it makes more sense to do a translation thoughtfully to avoid a do-over. I suspect that most do-overs—that is, translations that the project manager thought were final and complete but are full of errors—are one of the consequences of this culture of speed. Will the pasta boil faster than following its natural course? Will cement for a building slab set faster than its natural course dictate? Will typing faster than 90 words per minute bring about a polished contract? Human minds cannot process information and knowledge faster than the human brain allows. There is something refreshing and reassuring of good results if we approach translation as a craft and not as a string of words to be cast on demand.

So what are your artistic influences in your work as a translator?

Translation is a function of writing

“What is it that you do, Mario,” asked my coworker, a software trainer with experience in rigging (as in venue rigging for shows, concerts, etc.).

I felt relaxed as I answered him: “My fancy title, localization specialist, means that I’m the company’s Spanish translator for software and documentation.”

We then briefly discussed our last exchange over some rigging terms like drops. In rigging, a drop can be a drop point or the point from where a load is dropped or suspended, or the load itself that is being suspended from a truss or similar structure. The reader may squint at this and say “Aha! You are talking about terminology in translation, not writing.” And the reader may be half right.

Due to the pressure of internet speed we think we have to operate daily, many of us translators and associated professionals assume that the key to a usable and appropriate translation is the use of industry-specific terminology. Let’s try a simple experiment to see if that’s true. The following was extracted from the Spanish Wikipedia article on radio a transistores:

Texas Instruments había demostrado varias radios completamente transistorizadas AM (amplitud modulada) el 25 de mayo de 1954​ pero su performance era muy inferior al de los modelos equivalentes a válvulas.

At a glance, correct terminology is being used in this paragraph but the observant reader will notice several solecisms, aside from the unnecessary anglicism performance. Texas Instrument “demoed” or demonstrated the operation of transistor radios, but the use of demostrar in the above paragraph means it exhibited or showed radios, now how they performed. The second glaring solecism appears at the end, “modelos equivalentes a válvulas,” to mean similar valve-based (radio) models.

A writer of any type of text needs to work from two distinct but related perspectives: the macrostructure and the microstructure. Put it another way, the author writing a handbook or a novel has to keep the larger picture of a chapter in mind while treading on the sentences, paragraphs or dialog bits on a page. A good writer, or translator, keeps the unity of texts, while the mediocre writer or translator segmentizes texts, forgets connectors, commits solecisms and other inexcusable writing failures. Strictly speaking of translation, a translator who is too dependent on the segmentized texts presented to her by CAT and TEnT tools is already failing in the writing task at hand, unless she works with the entire macrostructure: a previewed page or section of text, for instance.

Why this imbalance occurs should be of interest to all of us. In layman’s terms, the text macrostructure is the domain of text grammar and the text microstructure that of sentence grammar. Most of us were taught language and literature via sentence grammar. I contend that this is the main reason we overfocus on terms or single words rather than on the entire text structure spanning sections, pages and chapters.

Translation is a function of writing, and writing is a function of an educated mind.

Doing research as a translator

Research is a basic human skill, no Ph.D. needed to perform research. As toddlers, we researched our surroundings by using all of our senses, stumbling along the way, burning our fingertips when grasping a hot ladle or stinging our eyes while getting scrubbed and having our abundant hair washed with shampoo. We acquired knowledge through experience, or experiential learning.

Our nascent research skills get a bit stumped along the way, particularly if we’re subjected to rote learning and a sanitized, tradition-protecting educational infrastructure: we memorize and recite facts, factoids and fictions to later regurgitate them in a different format: oral lessons, multipage theses, business reports. If we’re part of a religious tradition with emphasis on certitude, all seeds of doubt be damned, we become survivalists, absorbing and internalizing received wisdom and passing it along later in life as professionals and instructors of every kind. What a critical thinker and thoughtful mind would consider outlandish ideas or impractical courses of action become mainstream thinking and knowledge, such as believing that there are two kinds of translators: those who work with agencies and those who work with premium clients.

So, what is research and how can it help us translators? During my two doctoral semesters in Portugal, I learned a thing or two about academic research and writing polished and purposeful papers. All this activity made me reflect on skills that I had exercised in other periods of my life, from my tweenage years to adulthood.

Proper research spans our whole lifetime, not just a job’s timeline.

First, research is born of intellectual curiosity. It is intellectual as opposed—at first— to pragmatic or practical curiosity because we want to acquire new knowledge for its own sake, for the satisfaction it brings to solve a mental puzzle, even if it doesn’t have immediate real-life application. That comes later as we continue our research.

Second, research requires observation, examination and analysis. We observe a phenomenon, an event or an incongruous situation, we examine it to understand the general idea of it, then we analyze it to break it down into more digestible parts. For instance, my idea of an engine’s torque became clearer after my brother explained it as a function of a motor’s shaft, along with concepts such as idling, engine power and resistance. All these steps require a higher level of abstraction absent in glancing an article or fast-reading a white paper.

Third, research focuses on facts and conclusions, regardless of how we personally feel about the nature of our eventual discovery. While it may be acceptable to have hopes for our research on how many Emperor penguins are born in January, we have to put aside our emotions in the face of the number of dead penguins because letting our feelings influence how we view and interpret facts and design our conclusions is just unacceptable. And unprofessional.

For instance, if I say I distrust the Bureau of Labor’s percentage about the annual growth of our profession, I have to be willing to argue for and against that number, investigate how the Bureau of Labor arrived at it, what criteria were used in interpreting facts and shaping conclusions…in particular the conclusion that the profession is growing without taking into account micro and macroeconomic factors such as regional economies, universities’ rate of graduates in translation, and price dynamics at local, national and international scale. True research abhors soundbites and requires careful reading and consideration, both in very short supply among the masses of speed-loving geeks that translators tend to become in ever increasing numbers.

Fourth, research not only accepts but welcomes third-party testing of its preliminary and final assumptions. It is not enough for just one astronomer to declare the appearance of a brand-new star or exoplanet as his findings have to be independently verified by his peers in other observatories and countries. Sadly, we translators seem to depend on a popularity index: we listen more attentively to those who blog the most, who have more published books, who are more charismatic, who attend the greatest number of conferences or write more journal-published articles. Authority by SEO and search hits, not by research.

Leaving aside our global situation as translators, I’ve been considering how to explain my research methods to nontranslators. A nontranslator, such as a client, a boss, a project manager or a coworker (who, by the way, aren’t necessarily monolingual or ignorant about what translators really do) requires careful explanation of translation research that is not condescending nor uppity, one that is not too complex but not simplistic and Manichean. It is a real struggle for me because the way we translators individually do research is as intricate and mysterious as the way we process our translations in our heads before we write them down.

Those of us who drive on a daily basis may describe the series of decisions taken as simply driving, without dividing it into all its component parts like getting into a car, putting the stick in drive, checking our mirrors, buckling up before pushing the gas pedal, not to mention the myriad decisions we make aided by our eyes and ears, scanning in front of the vehicle and sideways, reading the intention of the other drivers surrounding us, feeling the wheel in the palms of our hands and knowing, almost instinctively, how much to turn it every which way and with what force or gentleness. All this is part of what we can call the topology of driving. We do something similar with translation. And research.

If a nontranslator asks us how we came up with a term or a turn of phrase in our translation, we simply say we found some clues in our specialized dictionaries or by reading industry articles or catalogs. But research is much more than that. You and I conduct this research in different ways depending on topic, deadline and availability of reliable resources. To many clients and translation buyers, the key mot juste is terminology or industry terms. They demand we know their jargon, buzzwords and language, how they call this thingamajik or that process. A company’s product is supported by a variety of different texts, from user guides to instructions to sales materials, but to a client, a business owner, coworker or project manager, all these texts share the same terms and the same brand. They’re right…and wrong.

For instance, Huawei makes routers for “innovative enterprise applications from small to super huge scale.” Words such as innovative and super huge scale are marketingspeak, but they’re part of the branding strategy for this company. If the translation of this text does not have words with the same oomph or impact as the English, a client might consider it a translation failure, despite all of our careful research. It’s the same with clunky English imports such as big data and [movie] streaming. They’re often left in English because, well, the translator couldn’t find an equally impressive Spanish or French or German equivalent, as if languages’ sole virtue for making global understanding possible resided on import words and false cognates.

Confronted with the task of explaining how I do research for my translations or how I come about with a sentence where a certain brand- or marketing-language word does not appear, I have to learn to go down into the thinking strata of my mind and emerge with the tools and methods I use to inquire about new concepts and express them in writing. However, even if I have a cogent narrative to offer, I have to run it through several filters to avoid coming across as a know-it-all spewing condescending prattle.

An uphill, ongoing challenge, this is. But a particular aptitude common to all translators is at my disposal, regardless of my personality or whether I am popular or not. The ability to translate, in its broadest sense, a complicated concept into an understandable one. Since I translate for a given reader or audience and tune my writing to their level of understanding, so should I proceed with filtering my innermost mental mechanics on research to provide not just a clear explanation but a persuasive one.

The inverse way of disrupting translation practice

I recall a sunny colleague calling me a Luddite on the Proz.com platform some years ago. The reason, vaguely recollected now, was that I chose to criticize a technology. It might have been translators using iPads, I don’t know. I confess to feeling jaded after reading numerous headlines about this or that technology increasing a translator’s productivity or how we should embrace AI, MT or some other technoacronym to bring home the bacon.

I also remember a translation agency owner (the agency, Antler Translation Services; Peter Wheeler the speaker) speaking at a New York Circle of Translators meeting in 1991. He spoke about translators pecking at a typewriter and fearing the desktop computer. That statement made a profound impression on me because a) I was a recent graduate with a translation diploma and b) I didn’t yet have a computer. I was enthusiastic, feeling paradoxically both new and at home among these translators who were challenging each other to move forward. Adopt the PC! seemed to be Mr. Wheeler’s proposed mantra.

We’ve come a long way in these intervening decades. That gentle push to embrace more efficient technologies has long been replaced by a less considerate and forceful thrust to board the fast-moving treadmill of technomarvels: CAT tools, TEnT tools, terminology extraction utilities, notebooks, laptops, mobile phones, file converters, project management and invoicing applications, webinars. They all march to the thrilling and shrilling marketing tune of each brand. And speaking of brand, we are told to imagine and develop our “personal brand” and speed network, smile and email our way into the hearts of new clients.

Your mind is not a cog. Don’t act like one.

But serious minds demand facts to support this whirlwind of tech-enabled innovation, creativity and get-the-rates-you-deserve chorus. No matter, the oft-cited Bureau of Labor figures extolling the double-digit year-on-year growth figures for the translation and interpreting profession will see us through.

Happy to quote these numbers, translation associations boost their MLM-grade conference offerings with promises of “networking that works” and other slick slogans. After all, hundreds and even thousands of members can’t all be wrong, now, can they? Is this the age of technomagic to transport us to a new era for translators? Can we really improve our lot as professional translators and the product of our labors with the flick of a technological wand? Call me a Luddite but I propose an antidigital approach to translation as a profession because I don’t care so much about my projected image as much as what I write in the form of translations.

I work with a team of translators. We use SDL Trados 2015. Our workstations hold 65 GB of RAM. All of our tools and applications reside in an internal cloud. That’s right—our desktop computers don’t have a hard drive to speak of. We enjoy a highly collaborative relationship with a team of workflow managers who take care of the mechanics of importing and exporting files, handling vendors and making sure our translation memories, termbases and other resources are on the right portals, waiting for us.

There are some unsettling trends that I thought were just my imagination, when I was working as an independent translator: not knowing how to use dictionaries, overdependence on Google hits to determine language usage, assessing translation quality by terminology choices, questionable research methods to determine sense and meaning in an original text or paragraph, overuse of bilingual dictionaries. I recognized some of these trends in the workplace, and they’re worrisome to me. These habits work to the detriment of two translation-related activities: reading and writing.

Reading is cheap and exposes us to a variety of genres and media, from advertisements to novels to specialized magazines and journals. Writing is likewise cheap and it can be done with almost anything over almost anything. I prefer the old writing instruments: pen or pencil, and a blank or lined sheet of paper. Before the reader tells me that reading or writing have little to do with advances in translation, productive tools and networking at conferences to get more clients, or raise rates to the level we all think we deserve, ask yourself: when was the last time you read something out loud? When was the last time you wrote a paragraph, a whole sheet describing, narrating or explaining anything?

Alone with your pen and paper, faced with the hum of your thoughts, try to make up a story, or describe an imaginary village or animal. Try rescuing a beloved teenage memory: your first day of driving a car, riding a bicycle, or seeing a sad face while riding the bus or subway. Consider what a dear friend told you about her day and try to put that in writing, just for yourself. Your mind, your hand, your eyes, your remembrances need no batteries. You don’t need to plug anything. Your high-definition screen in the mind helps you connect the dots.

Years ago I embarked on a sort of lone crusade to work more slowly, to give my eyes a little more time to read the originals I was given to translate, to read over the freshly mindbaked sentences I wrote on my CAT tool, to reconsider merging “segments” so that the language would flow more idiomatically and more naturally in written form. That endeavor, which I playfully called Keep calm and translate slowly, cost me dearly: rush-driven clients stopped calling me, tight deadlines deserted me, but I kept enjoying working with a select few clients who trusted me and with whom I developed lasting business relationships. But market forces being what they are don’t favor such unusual approaches and I was forced to go to the corporate world, where I am surrounded by technology. At least I am given enough time to work at my own pace as long as I am efficient.

Although our translation memories, built by other translators with different reading and writing habits, govern the way I review translations, whenever I am given a translation, I flex my mind muscles and put my own habits to work. I am free to apply my own research, reading and writing methods, techniques—not technologies— that bring me closer to the reader. I still harbor the hope that there is at least one reader who cares about language, about how things are written, who expects to savor a sentence, parse a paragraph, sense the syntax cadence that is carefully assembled for her use and decision-making. Because, no matter what technology you choose to translate with, the warm, distilled sense of human communication, whether oral or written, will always endure and transcend your technotoys.

What’s so disruptive about “disruptive”?

According to Google’s Ngram graph generator, the phrase “disruptive technology” appeared in print in the mid 1990s. Another phenomenon appeared at the same time: the dot.com bubble.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, recently wrote an article titled “Startups are not as disruptive as they appear,” adding:

“…the rapid growth of companies like AOL and Amazon —no matter the strength of their underlying businesses— whetted Wall Street’s appetite for exponential growth. And young founders took the bait, prioritizing inflated valuations over sustainable business models. The ideal shifted from building a company to getting it acquired.” (TIME magazine, March 21, 2016)

My readers might surmise that I’m about to indicate the correct Spanish translation for “disruptive”.  Alas, Fundéu has already done it:

I disagree, since we can use innovador, radical, revolucionario among other terms. As useful as Fundéu is for us translators and language users, I don’t just grab the first option. First, let’s see how the word is used in contemporary English. The American Heritage Dictionary (online version) defines disruptive thus:

In this short analysis of the adjective disruptive, specific lexicogrammatical coordinates are required. It is not enough to define a word but to see what other words can be used in its stead. Here’s a list of conventional synonyms from Thesaurus.com:

We find more up-to-date information in the online MacMillan dictionary. The new usage for disruptive appears as “showing approval; original and new in a way that causes change.” But, doesn’t the English language have words for that already? Examples: innovative, radical, revolutionary.
It is clear that we can arrive at more intelligible options that are not buzzwords. Buzzwords can be part of an argot (casual vocabulary) or jargon (professional vocabulary). They aren’t just communicating a message (“this new memory chip is revolutionary!”) but also a philosophy. Let’s remember, however, that a company’s or manufacturer’s philosophy (so enshrined in their Mission and Vision statements) mask the reasons why the consumer should buy their products.

One of the features of a translation is communication, but it is hardly its only function. A translation can convey beauty (a poem), lifesaving information (hazardous material datasheet), instructions to achieve a task (repair of a water heater) and much more. To say that translators are communicators is as reductive and pedestrian as saying that a piano keyboard makes sounds.

A translator consulting Google for frequency of use of a certain neologism as his primary method of determining the right word in a translation is not doing his job. You, the end user, the project manager, the customer, the company owner, advertising manager or marketing copywriter, deserve better. After all, you also have access to a web browser and connection to the Internet. You could have arrived at the same conclusion by doing a search yourself. So, why are you paying that translator after all?

Being bilingually skilled to work with words is not enough. Pre-Internet, a rush search for an equivalent in a foreign language would involve consulting a dictionary. But a dictionary definition can only do so much. Reading actual usage of that word in the real world, in the here and now, requires a more empirical research method, and that necessitates reading relevant texts. For a translator, searching for the equivalent of our mot du jour, “disruptive,” should include not only reading the relevant English texts but also the French, Spanish or Chinese texts that are also relevant and specific.

A word about relevant texts: the translator will need to select the texts that show word usage with the least load of intentionality. Put it another way, a relevant text for our research purposes is any text that is not trying to sell you something (an idea or a product). With practice, a translator will learn to identify relevant texts and discard irrelevant ones. Now, back to being “disruptive.” As you may have surmised, the exposition of definitions, synonyms and arguments above is part of my own research of this word to better understand not just what meaning it carries but also how it (the word) interacts with other parts of speech, with other texts and with other meanings.

The previous paragraph may sound like a headache to the average person, but all those processes happen inside the head of a properly trained professional translator or terminologist. We are just seeing the product of those processes in this entry to illustrate how the complex may seem simple and quick, but only on the surface.

Any translator worth his salt will tell you that a proper translation will carry the original meanings over to the receiving language: your slogan will sound as peppy and impactful in French as it does in English; your technical descriptions will appear as clear and purposeful in the foreign language just like your technical writer or engineer made them in the original language. Your English advertisement will be as persuasive in Chinese. But let’s be careful: a translator is just the intermediary, the bridge between you and your end user. There is no need for the translator to adopt marketingspeak or advertising lingo. Yet that’s exactly what some translators, judging by what they write on blogs or industry publications, seem to have done with “disruptive.” They have become besotted with the promises behind that adjective, and that becomes a problem. Instead of being translators, they act like product evangelists (buzzword use totally intended). Like a faithful interpreter, a translator should act agnostic to the meaning or message he is carrying over for you to another language and culture.

There and Back Again: Changes in the world of translation

There are as many definitions of translation as there are people in the world. Or, at least, as there are people who want you to hear their definition of such a pedestrian profession. Age gives you a new set of goggles to see the world every few years if you are gracious enough to let Time give you advice, that is.

Let’s assume translation has one main role, that of allowing one culture to be understood by another, and vice versa. In that sense, translation’s goal never ends as long as human cultures endure towards that end horizon we never seem to reach. That one culture needing to be understood in a different one possesses attributes, nuances and colors foreign to the receiving culture is a given. That cultural differences may be different, even shockingly surprising, is a fact that does not change. So, what does change in translating them? Processes, procedures, workflows, sales tactics, terminologies —What exactly?

The school of translation I attended in my youth was formerly called a school of languages, which reveals the fountainhead of ideas guiding the teaching of translation, imposing the models that are to be copied and passed down to professors and students, and offering up lists of authoritative books on linguistics, dictionaries, theories, etc. A closed world, you might say, almost like a serpent pursuing its own tail. Why? Even though translation was being (and continues to be) taught for several language pairs (Spanish>Italian, Spanish>German, Spanish>French, Spanish to English being the most popular), this academic bubble keeps on churning out translation graduates to an ever-encroaching global world. During my stay in Córdoba (Argentina) in 2005-2007, translation students graduating with little or no knowledge of how to present themselves to the world or understanding on the use of CAT tools was the common complaint I’ve heard. The emphasis in translation teaching was squarely set on language, grammar and texts.

My alma mater, the Facultad de Lenguas de la UNC

From that school of translation of the 1980s to the Aughts of the 21^st century, I saw a significant change: a university offering hundreds of Spanish, French, German or Italian translators to a nonexistent local market to the same institution offering an increasing number of Spanish translators to a globalized local market. And that brings us to a second change, that of the local or urban market, quite well defined in its physical, commercial and intellectual boundaries, converting, voluntarily or not, to one more affiliate of the global machinery of commerce. As a company, big or small, you no longer have to send representatives to foreign countries… you send your translated literature to those lands!

Moving on to an aspect with a different scope: translation itself has changed. The forces of globalized commerce, rather than bringing together different cultures, languages and cities, have brought them into closer proximity via two distinct vehicles: the English language and consumeristic technologies. In the 70s and 80s, the translated literature accompanying a product was something of a luxury or an option, but it was certainly not a commodity. In fact, if memory serves me well, reading the Spanish translation of some consumer pamphlet or manual was a singular experience that enhanced the purchase, or “purchase experience” as the marketers of today are wont to say.

This purchase or acquisition was enhanced because the translation itself revealed a level of writing, of composition, an arrangement of texts that we no longer see in assembly-lined texts produced within companies where simultaneous release or production is prime priority. The excellence in writing a piece announcing the new car model, computer or coffeemaker, for example, has been replaced with so-called quality statistics, colorful infographics and PowerPoint slides. Translations have lost their soul.

I still remember the care I needed to place on writing a single-page introductory letter to prospective buyers of the milk products my company was making for local markets, which were no longer sufficient for expansion. My boss, the sales manager, had to approve my drafts before I could commit a single word to paper via our IBM Selectric typewriter. Now companies rely more on robomail, Word templates and slick stock photography on websites to introduce themselves. Where’s the writing skill? The individualized text has become the commoditized content.

In the face of such challenges, companies intent on penetrating new and foreign markets —or that want to reintroduce themselves ­­— ­­­­would do well in securing the services of translators who are very good writers first and language experts second. People and individuals, all consumers in one way or another, still want to feel personally welcome, distinctly touched by your writing, even in the Age of Emojis.

El traductor como lector-autor

El siguiente es un ejercicio en redacción en mi primer idioma natal, el español. Quizás algunos lectores se sientan obligados a pedirme la versión en inglés (háganlo, si así lo desean).

Note: this posting is an exercise in Spanish writing, and Spanish is my first mother tongue. If you’d like to read this post in English, kindly ask me via a comment or email. Thank you.

Algunos de mis colegas ya saben que estoy matriculado en un programa de doctorado en traducción y terminología. Aclaro que más me interesa la traducción que la terminología; esta última es una disciplina multidisciplinar (como lo es la traducción o los llamados estudios de traducción) que merece su nota de bitácora por separado.

Una de las cuestiones que ha venido aguijoneándome desde hace años es la enseñanza de la traducción. Y el móvil de estos pensamientos surgió en un rincón inesperado: la redacción técnica en inglés. Allá por 1997 me había matriculado en una clase (tres horas crédito) dictada por un profesor de origen armenio o persa, muy afable y organizado. El programa, ofrecido por Cal State-Fullerton, se centraba más en los principios de redacción técnica más que en los programas informáticos que más de moda estaban entre los comunicadores técnicos del momento, como RoboHelp, DreamWeaver, FrontPage y Quark Xpress.

¿Acaso podemos enseñar a otros a escribir? La pregunta es un poco tautológica y también se contesta sola en caso afirmativo. Todos aprendemos a hablar en la cuna cultural que nos toca. En esa aula de la vida y la familia, aprendemos los sonidos que refieren a esos glifos y símbolos que llamamos ya sea letras, palabras, idiogramas o pictogramas (según seamos de ascendencia europea, china o polinesia, etc.). A medida que aprendemos a dominar el encadenamiento de sonidos y palabras, vamos nombrando ideas, sentimientos, cosas y conceptos, en medio del ensayo y el error. Claro, cometíamos muchísimos errores, que a nuestros mayores a veces les parecían graciosos, encantadores, tontos o una combinación de todo ello. Siempre me maravilló pensar en que un niñito que yerra mientras aprende a hablar y a expresarse poco le importa que se rían de él. Es más, toma las risas y bromas como parte del aprendizaje, sin internalizarlas ni guardarlas. Comparemos esa circunstancia con la del adulto cualquiera que reacciona con un gesto ofendido cuando se le corrige la escritura, la puntuación o la gramática.

Aprender a leer es ese puente que todos cruzamos a tientas hasta que podemos expresarnos por escrito. Es una labor ardua y disciplinada que nos lleva mucho más esfuerzo que aprender a hablar. Y hay varios estadios de aprendizaje y de dominio, desde el nivel del tercer grado (por un ejemplo) hasta la categoría universitaria y más allá. Descubrimos, de adultos, que el habla y la escritura se especializan cada vez más tanto por razones tanto tribales como profesionales.

Aprender a escribir es una actividad continua que nos lleva toda la vida. A menos que decidamos quedarnos en un estadio, como el del trabajador en una fábrica de zapatillas, contentos con lo alcanzado y sin que nos interesen otras áreas del conocimiento, siempre necesitaremos armarnos de nuevos vocabularios y nuevos recursos retóricos para expresarnos por escrito.

Hay quienes están satisfechos con dar el siguiente parte sobre las vacaciones de una semana tomadas el verano pasado: “La pasé muy bien/Me divertí muchísimo/La ciudad era espectacular/Hice muchos amigos/Visité varios museos” y así sucesivamente. Los parlamentos se acortan, aunque desestimo la primera razón que nos parece obvia: que estamos apurados en la vida. No, no lo creo. Otro ejemplo es responder al amigo o pariente que nos ve luego que hemos visto una película de estreno. Solícitamente nos pregunta: “¿Cómo fue la película? ¿De qué se trataba?” Y le contestamos con frases remanidas como “¡Estuvo fantástica!/Era un drama basado en hechos reales ocurridos en la Alemania del siglo XIX/Era una de aventuras con Hombre-Araña y Tor; me gustaron las actuaciones y los efectos especiales”.

Y ahí se terminan nuestras habilidades redactoras.

Uno de los ejercicios que daba a mis alumnos de traducción años atrás era el de escribir un trozo de 150-200 palabras en el que me describieran un paseo, un monumento, una visita a una ciudad, etc. En lugar de recurrir a las expresiones cuasineandertálicas (si se me permite el humor), estos alumnos se veían entre impulsados y forzados a describir, armar oraciones complejas, usar varios tiempos verbales, además de adverbios, frases preposicionales y otros recursos conocidos pero caídos en desuso. Claro, algunos de los trabajos se leían como relatos formulistas y preenvasados, pero era un buen paso.

Traducir es leer y (re)escribir lo leído. Para que la traducción no se lea formulista ni tenga todas las características de un texto zombi, hay que cultivar buenos hábitos de lectura, los cuales siempre informarán nuestros hábitos de escritura. Es indispensable ir más allá de leer textos en nuestros idiomas natales; hay que seleccionarlos con cuidado, sin temor a equivocarnos. Ya sean libros, revistas, artículos, ponencias, intervenciones, libros, folletos, afiches, almanaques, tarjetas, etcétera, todo es útil. Que nada escape a nuestro ojo crítico.

Nuestros ojos son como un segundo cerebro que desempeña actividades tanto cuando están abiertos como cuando están cerrados. ¿O acaso no han cerrado los ojos cuando escuchan una melodía o después de leer un pasaje, a fin de visualizar lo escuchado o lo leído? Los ojos no son simplemente faros ni detectores de modelos visuales (pattern scanners). Es posible desarrollar y cultivar una vista estereoespacial, a la manera del sonido estereofónico, donde podamos aprehender diferentes pieles textuales, distintos matices y colores en las palabras. Si aprendemos o reaprendemos el arte de la lectura, más allá de su obvia utilidad cotidiana, estoy seguro de que podremos aprender a escribir con una soltura aún por descubrir, en la cual nos podamos reconocer.

A day in the life of a 21st century translator

I’m not your vanilla-type translator. I’m not a conventional writer. Keen-eyed readers of my blog might have noticed that I never capitalize Every Single Word in my blog headings. I march to the beat of my own drum. However, I didn’t start like that at all. I thought I would be translating articles, business documents or similar media day in and day out for a corporation or organization after I earned my diploma.

Twenty five years ago, with a bachelor’s degree in English and Translation Studies in hand, I did not have one or two specializations in mind. Although I had studied the basics of Law for four semesters as part of the translation studies’ curriculum, I only knew I didn’t want to be a sworn translator nor a bilingual officer of the court (called perito bilingüe in Argentina at the time) nor did I want to specialize in legal translation (as in law-related translations).

The two main forces that shaped my professional decisions over those 25 years were not creativity, inspiration, following a particular leader or influencer or discovering the holy grail of selling professional services. No, sir. The two factors that drove me to where I am today as a diplomate translator were a) market demands on my services and b) my own intellectual interests.

There you have it then: I’m not a translator who just writes translations day in and day out. Today, Thursday, May 5th, 2016, is representative of what I do:

• Write and deliver a rush 400-word corporate translation by 11:30 a.m.
• Finish a medical transcription in Spanish and then translate it into English for delivery by noon
• Insert newly translated paragraph in two InDesign documents, prepare deliverables (PDF files for printing) and deliver them before 7:30 p.m.
• Review the typesetting of a corporate slogan I had translated into Spanish weeks ago and send the annotated PDF file back to the customer, with pertinents recommendations to their desktop publisher for improving copy of the same corporate slogan in RTL (right-to-left) languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Translation courses and BA/MA programs for the 21st century emphasize the use of software tools to manage projects, terminology lists and translation memories. These courses also include practical instructions on project management (a related career choice for translators), software localization (another related career) and business aspects of the profession, such as marketing tips. All these components are important and have a place in a translator’s career, but they should not be taught nor emphasized at the expense of a thorough, critical and lively discussion of the craft of translation. After all, a translator is a craftsman. It’s the writing, not the tools, that make a translator, whether in this century or in the millenia to come.