TRANSLATION
AND COPING WITH STANDARDS
You might find, as a student of modern languages, that one of the most challenging aspects of translating is making it seem like the text hasn’t actually been translated, or making it ‘sound natural’.
While this isn’t the aim of every translation, it’s what will often be asked from us in an exam for instance, because that’s what is the objective required from professional translators. This problem might seem strange to people who have never tried their hand at it, especially when we’re talking about translating into our mother tongue. Why should a native have any difficulty in making a text sound native?
It is difficult. If you’re capable of understanding a text in a second language, you immerse yourself in it. At least you should do before you start actually translating it. At this stage the whole body of the text makes complete sense within the rules of the language (assuming the text is written well enough), like any system does when you look at it only from the inside. When you then examine the text from the point of view of translating it, you start to see the things that don’t make sense in your target language. Often it’s easy to identify what simply doesn’t work in your own language. Just as often, though, you let things slip by unnoticed.
You identify the challenges of the text, you do some research, and maybe you look at how other texts of the same type have been treated. You proceed to translate, making choices along the way in order to resolve particular problems. Finished! Reasonably satisfied, you leave it. And when you come back to it, you find that some bits, if not many, sound… foreign.
It seems that in the process of translating we move into a different space, in between the two languages, where we can see and understand the perspective of each, and in trying to report the contents of the source language to the target language we’ve come back with some funny expressions. Sometimes they might be a strange mixture of both languages/cultures, or neither, that exist in no language’s standard. After all, in this process we’ve enjoyed the freedom of interpreting things from a different culture in a very personal way, so it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve returned with some eccentricities. But they’re noticeable eccentricities, and back in our linguistic homeland we don’t like that. It’s weird.
This is one of the reasons it is so important to let a translation rest before you can call it finished. It’s only been possible to see that these odd bits are in fact odd because we’ve set the text and its problems aside and returned to our ‘default setting’, linguistically speaking. Suddenly foreignness stands out again.
Ned Darlington
LINGUA