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.

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The absent-minded pandemic

I wrote a lengthy posting a while ago regarding the pandemic and its effects on independent translators. Notice that I refuse to call ourselves freelance translators because that designation is too merchantilistic and constitutes a paean to purist capitalism. I began to discuss how our ability to plan, like planning trips, has been deeply affected by the conditions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic.

A few weeks ago I read about how the pandemic conditions are affecting our ability to form memories. It turns out that we need physical movement to aid in generating memories. Without the boundaries from one destination to the next, we seem to be at a loss, we begin to see our activities as a continuum of sameness, a spectrum of dull grey events. Also, the inability to tell daily events to each other dilutes our remembering of those events. This is scary.

From what I gather, our physiological ability to create memories is not at risk; it’s how that ability is becoming altered by external forces, whether we’re quarantining or complying with state or city orders to avoid congregating indoors, keeping our distance and wearing a mask. Even if we are able to go about town wearing a mask as dutifully as we’re asked, our ability to interact with others becomes severely limited. We are meant to read faces, eye expressions, lips along with the rest of our body language, even if we are talking. Somehow more than half of what we want to say drops out of our message, muffled by our masks.

Our mind shifts back and forth in isolation, making planning more difficult for some (Photo credit to Maria Kubitz’ blog.)

In short, we find ourselves severely limited in our planning. Aside from making short trips to wherever masked human beings are allowed, I cannot make travel plans for vacation or for holidays until I get my full covid-19 vaccination. Even then, I have to anticipate which destinations allow travelers, what airlines require a confirmation of a successful vaccine, eschewing any locations that impose a quarantine due to weaker conditions there. I don’t travel internationally as frequently as 10 years ago,

In conclusion, I’ve been reflecting on one particular aspect the pandemic is affecting us, even if we may not be fully aware of it. Now that swaths of people are slowly being allowed to go maskless if they’re fully vaccinated, the temptation to fast forward to what we considered a normal life is strong. Most of us will wish to just forget 2020 ever happened in our lives, whether we are translators or not. I wonder how this global health crisis hoisted on us will alter us in the short and long run.

As a corollary note, I’ve been more cognizant of my screen time because the glass cage only engages my eyes, not my whole body. And I need my body to make memories. What about you?

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?

Letter to translators without a diploma

 

Dear translator without a diploma:

In my 27 years as a professional, full-time translator, I’ve worked alongside translators from different walks of life: doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, former language teachers, and others. I would like to address those of you who (a) are bilingual and (b) do not have a university degree.

In the United States, being bilingual has many advantages; those who speak and write one or more foreign languages (aside from English, understood) enjoy an almost intuitive trust from their superiors and colleagues who do not. Being able to work in a variety of environments with that knowledge is truly a privilege. However, this bilingualism has a dark side: monolingual people who see a bilingual person speak or write in a foreign language have no way of telling how complete or deep that language knowledge is. Many bilinguals like yourself have arrived with an apparently complete knowledge of their foreign language, have studied English here and they assume they are fully bilingual.

To be fully and competently bilingual, say, in English and Spanish, requires to have received the same level of education on both languages. For example, a person who holds a 4-year university education degree in America should have had received the same level of education in her foreign country. But the reality with you is that you came to this country with a completed primary or secondary education and nothing else. This is not necessarily your fault, as the timing and circumstances of your arriving here may not have been under your control. But you made the best of it and you continued and completed your native education in English-speaking institutions. So, your bilingualism is asymmetrical. There is an imbalance between your foreign language vocabulary and knowledge of grammar and the same knowledge in the English language.

You may have worked on different positions and, somehow, you or someone else assumed that your being bilingual naturally qualified you to work as a translator. You knew that your foreign language knowledge was not up to the same level as your English knowledge. For instance, you know all of your English verb tenses and know how to use your English prepositions, but you can’t honestly recall how many verb tenses there are in your foreign language, that language that once was your mother tongue. You speak it natively, you are knowledgeable about the latest expressions in that mother tongue, but you hesitate when you write stuff in it. You struggle to write something from scratch in your mother tongue because you lack the necessary tools. Worse yet: you struggle at it because you don’t particularly love to write.

The advantage of working as a translator for you is that you can mask your lack of knowledge by following English grammar structures and syntax when you translate, and assuming this is what the concept of fidelity is in translation. You are wrong. You have been wearing a mask for some time know, and it’s time for you to come clean. First, you need to recognize your lack of full knowledge of your mother tongue in order to freely express yourself in writing. Because translation is writing.

Second, you need to accept that degree of ignorance and do something constructive about it, like getting a college or university degree that requires studying and writing in your mother tongue. If you are to be intellectually honest about calling yourself a translator, and if you want to behave ethically as a professional translator, you owe it to yourself, your clients, and your loved ones.

I am not particularly interested in hearing about how many years of translation work you have done. What started as a deceit, even if it was a lie of omission in order to work, eat and have a roof over you, needs to find its way to an honest way of living. As for obtaining a college or university diploma from educating yourself in your mother tongue, you have a multitude of choices, and not all of them involve filing for a Pell grant or incurring heavy amounts of debt. There are MOOC courses, free online courses and other pathways to achieving what I’m recommending you to do. Please consider these options seriously.

But this is not just a call for you all to improve your knowledge of your mother tongue. Your pretense of being a translator when you are not is hurting the livelihood of translators who made sacrifices, who received a university education, who knew or discovered they had a talent for writing and became competent at it in two languages. You may continue to deceive your customers, who think that, by hearing you speak in, say, Spanish, you are equally competent in writing in that language. But you are not. You are hurting the rest of us translators because you go after our clients, you flood social media, networking and job websites with your resumes and pretend to be one of us, but you are not.

I wish the profession of translator were regulated, that a 4-year university diploma were mandatory and a written exam in the foreign language were also mandatory. You fail either of those requirements and you are barred from calling yourself a translator or seeking translation work. That’s my pipe dream, anyway. I, for one, built my profession on an avocation, on solid homework through all the educational levels, from kindergarten all the way through graduate school, in my mother tongue, may I add. I am a translator because I enjoy writing very much. Colleagues of mine who are equally competent can say the same thing.

Sooner or later, your mask will slip off and your incompetent writing will show. Then you will discover the tragic sadness of having built your reputation on sand. Please, stop being an impostor, decide if you want to continue deceiving others with your subpar, mediocre writing in your mother tongue. You should enjoy writing because your writing is you. If you cannot be yourself when you write in your mother tongue, you have no business working 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.

A cemetery for buzzwords

Venado Tuerto is a city located in the Argentinean province of Santa Fe. Once, I paid a visit to a group of friends there, when we were in our twenties. On Sunday, after church, one of them suggested we go visit the cemetery. Back in the day, parklike cemeteries were a novelty, a welcome development that brought a less brutalist, less arid platform to bury our dead. Crisscrossed by paths and dotted with shrubs and trees, this cemetery was a new experience for me: very peaceful, green, with hardly any visitors despite being Sunday.

The Cementerio Parque Otoñal cemetery in Venado Tuerto (Santa Fe, Argentina)

 

I’ve visited cemeteries on occasion since then, all following the park template that I found so soothing and welcoming. The dead are assured visitors, flowers, memorials, tomb plates. For both the religious and nonreligious, a cemetery is a neutral place of quietness, and sometimes solitude, far removed from the hustle and bustle of urban affairs.

When writers and translators commit thoughts to paper or screen, they rummage through the almost endless drawers of memory: new words, old expressions, popular phrases, forgotten terms. Using a word that has fallen into disuse is an act of courage, provided there is a sound reason for such use. Dictionaries, thesauri and other resources are like large drawers of knowledge. Who hasn’t gotten lost among the white aisles of a dictionary page looking for word A and ending up reading, mesmerized, word B or C?

Dictionary houses such as Oxford or Collins have an ongoing tradition, the Word of the Year. “Single-use” became word of the year 2018 (see news article here). Maybe that word is not so relevant to many of us, but the tradition has a nobler purpose beyond being newsworthy: words, even buzzwords and ephemeral terms, have a right to be heard and read. The usage of a word, even the much-dismissed buzzwords (full disclosure: I don’t like buzzwords), is subject to and the result of a myriad of individual and collective decisions. Even hashtags on Twitter have become buzzwords, like #HeforShe, #metoo and #BlackLivesMatter, their meanings amplified by the ever-present popularity contests on social media.

But I have a beef with buzzwords: they obscure meaning, rob texts of clarity, stupefy the act of reading and understanding and force the reader to read again what should have been clear in the first place. Good writers, including translators, text reviewers and editors, ought to build a cemetery for buzzwords in their minds, a large pit where showy but useless terms get dumped. But this cemetery should have some categorization to avoid the resurrection of these zombie terms that eat up at the conciseness of a text. For instance, the buzzword “business case” can be replaced with “reason(s) why a project or action is profitable or advantageous” and then dropped down the hatch ending in my buzzword cemetery. I know that buzzword is there, referring to my longer but clearer phrase, but it’s under a do not use category. This exclusion policy takes a great deal of discipline but, what is good writing if not disciplined thinking set to words?

Journalists, our brothers in writing

Judging by recent news, journalists have a target on their back. The gradual disappearance of printed newspapers and physical attacks such as the one committed against the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, MD cast a long and lingering cloud not just over journalists and newspapers, but over free press, a requirement for democracy.

No matter what you do in life, writing is you go-to tool. Even if your most elaborate written expression is texting with emojis, you still depend on two things: communicative symbols and a medium to convey them. Our ancestors started with their fingers painting on rocks. Clay tablets and sand boxes for Chinese calligraphy were reusable to an extent, but transient in purpose and effect. Paraphrasing a statement by Neil deGrasse Tyson in the Cosmos series, humans found a way to be immortal by writing.

Writing can be a personal, semiprofessional or professional activity. Even in the 21st century, we all write in one way or another, mainly to communicate with others: family, friends, coworkers, the boss, perfect strangers. But we are not writers per se in the sense that it is all we do to earn a living. A wedding planner uses writing as one of many activities he performs. A novel writer, on the other hand, writes on and off the clock, as it were. He writes to entertain, to explore, to express himself.

Oh, pardon me for using “gendered language.” As much as I support a gender equality that is both fair and reasonable, I don’t toe the line of the sexism police in writing because language use evolves with people, not by decree, however well-intentioned it may be. If it helps sensitive readers, I include everyone, men and women of any orientation, sexual or otherwise, when I use he, him, or any masculine particle.

Back to writers: In this realm, several pen-wielding citizens live. Their activity requires writing expertise and a deep motivation to use writing for justifiable purposes. Among those writers, we find journalists of different stripes, from those who work at sensationalist magazines to those who toil among company that many people would deem unworthy: the homeless, the ex cons and jailed ones, poor single parents, dubious celebrities, notorious reality-show stars, obscure public officials, Wall Street types and one-percenters.

I find it admirable that some journalists find the even-handedness and equality to ask questions and remain calm and professional despite being insulted, aggrieved and lumped with what some high-minded individuals consider the scum of the earth. In a democracy, we may like, even admire a written column or a newspaper editorial, or disagree with the columnist. If we feel incensed by a reportage we consider full of falsehoods or calumny, many reputable newspapers and magazines have a very democratic mechanism: letters to the editor. But, who has the time to write a letter to the editor to complain about an inaccuracy or unfair portrayal in a newspaper these days? Hey, we can twitter or facebook it. But we risk shooting ourselves in the foot.

First, writing a letter requires time to think, then put our thoughts on paper (or email). Writing also requires that we stick to some standards: be polite, state your goal, offer your approval or disapproval, or a strong objection, and explain your reasons for it. Close it politely. You might find it surprising, but you don’t need to be a grammarian or an A+ on your scorecard for English writing. People are very forgiving with typos, run-on sentences and lack of concordance; they get the gist. Finally, and most importantly to me at least, writing such a letter is influenced by what you’ve seen written in other “Letters to the editor” sections: as much as you and I may disagree with their arguments, as much as we find them silly or nonsensical, they’re worded politely and stick to the point. The inherent formality of a newspaper page (on paper or on screen) underscores the fact that this is a civil and democratic society. Civil first, democratic second, because a democracy can never happen without civil discourse.

Properly trained journalists, whether in school or at work, learn to research and write drafts until the whole piece is coherent and supported by facts. We translators act a bit more like ghost writers—the topic is not of our choosing, let alone the reasons and arguments. Yet we are free to research the proper and best ways to express them in the target language. We are free to rearrange the syntax furniture according to the natural uses of the target language. But our writing need not be purely a mechanic exercise. Translators can do much better: we are free to choose what we read to serve as a well of usage in different domains, a collection of writing models we can enrich our writing practice with.

There is a Spanish proverb, “dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres” (You can judge a man by the company he keeps). Adapting it to ourselves, I’d say “dime qué lees y te diré qué tan bien escribes” (Your reading informs your writing, or Your writing is as good or as poor as the things you choose to read). Consciously or not, we read others because we’re looking for models of expression; we follow examples, good or bad. How do we know they’re good or bad? By their results, their effects on us and on others. If I read an elegant phrase, an elegantly phrased translation in a business letter or a health care brochure, if I’m a writer, I want to be able to write like that. If a turn of phrase, whatever its origin, makes me feel good about a topic, I am likely to replicate it. The effects are cumulative, in my view.

I have been feeling a surging need to support journalism, the best kind, whether it’s political, religious, economic or plainspoken in nature. We are living in yet another age where journalists are being decried as enemies, execrated, put in jail or executed. Yet their writing will endure. Writing is our ticket to an immortality of sorts. Well, then, do we want to be remembered by a tweet or a facebook posting, or by something more substantive and reflective of who we are?

Food for thought, and for writing.

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, or let’s stop blaming Google Translate for bad output

During our team’s weekly terminology meeting, we examined some poorly translated specimens, such as extraordinarias amortizaciones de capital translated as “extraordinary amortizations of principal.” One of my colleagues, Rafael, half smiled and half snickered when he said “Oh, sounds like Google Translate.”

We translators are detail oriented in the best of times. In the worst of times, we are fault finders. Identifying a collage of symptoms is not diagnosis, however, and we collectively tend to misidentify as Google Translate output a translation that is more likely the product of poor writing skills.

We might think that the more experienced we are as translators, the better we are at spotting errors and the nature of those errors. But human psychology points to habituation, where our eyes increasingly get used to seeing an erroneous or nonsensical expression (a phrase like “scientifically formulated”) as normal. Even the expression “the new normal” is suspect if subject to careful scrutiny.

How can we, trained language specialists*, be prone to misread an agrammatical or erroneous statement and consider it normal? One answer could be that it’s one side of language evolution. Language users push the boundaries of what’s conventional until a critical mass of users is reached, users who agree that a newly formulated expression is normal. By force of habit, no less. To the trained eye, a sentence, phrase or question that sounds, walks and reads too far apart from convention is considered incorrect. To the bristled consciences out there, the binomial correct/incorrect is a requisite judgment function. Yes, you can talk and write any way you want. But if you want your writing to be meaningful to others beside you and convey a message to others, you have to play by the rules. Rules set up by the majority of users. Grammar rules, syntax rules, vocabulary-forming rules.

Instead of blaming our machines for our own mistakes, we need to look in the mirror and see who is actually the writing instrument at play. Is it possible to write so poorly that we can mistake the product for the GIGO trash spat out by computer? Certainly. But AI, MT and their offspring such as Google Translate have enough blemishes and misshapen innards and brains, we do not need to torture them any further by misplacing on them the responsibility—and the guilt— that is

so distinctly and humanly ours to face.

 

*The expression is broadly and generously applied here.

Taking the pulse of translation theories

If you are a translator or interpreter going to the upcoming ATA Conference in San Francisco, USA, consider performing this unscientific but social experiment: ask any of the veteran translators at the hotel lobby if they have a preferred translation theory.

If you get a hesitant reply, a stare or a shrug, don’t be discouraged. Or surprised. The more veteran the translator is, or the more steeped he/she is in the latest technologies or sales pitches for translation services, the less interested our colleague will be in (insert a derisive pause here) any translation theory.

Why is that? Glad you asked, because one of my current objectives as a PhD student at the Universidade de Aveiro – Universidade de Nova joint doctoral program in Translation and Terminology is to listen to, learn about and discuss relevant translation theories. By relevant theories I mean concepts that ordinary translators can apply in their workflows. For example, Eugene Nida’s literal-and-dynamic (or functional, as Nida claimed in later years) equivalence theory is rooted on biblical translations, a subject hardly relevant to commercial or technical translators today. That doesn’t make it irrelevant, however. But that’s a discussion for another day.

The writing of a translation is where the translation theories (i.e. our writing choices) are often applied.

And why, you may ask, translation theories should be relevant to the most important people in our profession —namely, our customers? They are, I would say, indirectly relevant to them. They don’t need to know them, but we do in order to base our translation decisions and provide adequate explanations for them.

One reason why exposing a customer to even a basic discussion of translation theories is unadvisable is that it can be dangerously confusing. For example, some customers already (and inadvertently) conflate two concepts: word-for-word (or literal) translation with a translation that is faithful to the original. While a customer may ask you to do a faithful translation (faithful to the meaning or spirit or intent of the original text —which, in Nida’s view, would be called a functional translation or, in Christiane Nord’s words, an instrumental translation— the selfsame client may bristle at not finding the same words (sometimes they’re false friends or false cognates) in your translation.

And some terminologists and terminology software advocates tend to muddle things up in this scenario by overemphasizing the importance or hierarchical relevance of a wordlist or glossary, or worse, by overselling the consistency between texts.

Studying and discussing translation theories and their specialized (i.e. arcane) terminology is par for the course in academic circles for translation studies. I recently expressed my view to one of my professors (in my very poor Portuguese, mind you) that we need to be the bridges between the world and the translation studies field to share these translation theories in an accessible language. I was given a reply that best attests to the surprise of making translation theories more accessible to the layman (“translation theory does not have esoteric language”). Still, that’s one of my objectives.

If you are a buyer of translation services, you may not need to know translation theories but you already know whether a text is well written or not. If you like to write, if you enjoy reading a well-composed document, you’re already knowledgeable in writing theory. The main bridge I propose for you to meet me half way is writing well for its intended purpose. I hope to meet you there soon.