Learning a New Language

Awhile back, guest blogger Penny Milbouer wrote about why it isn’t so common to study languages in the United States. Studying languages may not be supported in schools, but what can you do if you want to learn a new language on your own?

Obviously, the best method is to live in a country where they speak the language (unless, of course, you want to learn Latin or another language that is rarely or never spoken now). Being surrounded by the language in question and having to use it to buy groceries, go to the doctor, socialize, or participate in other everyday activities forces you to improve your language skills quite quickly. A problem can occur here if you move to a country where everyone wants to learn your native tongue and insists on speaking with you in that language instead. That’s a common problem for people who have English as their mother tongue. When I moved to Sweden, I found it challenging to practice my Swedish, since so many people could speak English and enjoyed doing so. “It’s so fun and cool to speak English,” I was told a number of times, despite the fact that I thought it was more fun and useful to speak Swedish.

It’s not always possible to move to another country to learn a new language, so in my opinion, the next best tip is to read books voraciously and actively. When I first learned Swedish, I studied a book on grammar and vocabulary. At the same time, I read lots of children’s books. Sure, there were times when I felt a little silly carrying a big pile of picture books through the library, but it was definitely a great way to improve my Swedish. Children’s books use simpler language than books for adults do, which naturally makes it easier to read them, plus there are pictures that help explain what is going on in the story, which then helps you decipher any tricky words. If you can find a native speaker to read those books aloud to you and to listen to you attempt to read them, that’s an extra bonus that benefits your pronunciation and listening skills. Plus, story time is definitely not just an enjoyable treat for kids!

Once you have grasped the basic grammatical rules and have memorized plenty of vocabulary, and once you can read and understand works for children and young adults, you can move on to periodicals and books for adults. I enjoyed looking at Swedish food magazines, and of course the pictures and the format of such magazines helped me learn more words. Other people have told me that they liked starting out with magazines on fashion, cars, gardening, or other topics that often are accompanied by illustrations, before attempting to read articles on culture or politics. Some countries also offer easy-to-read periodicals aimed at teaching immigrants both the language and about the culture. Similarly, there are many easy-to-read novels, often shortened versions of classics, so those are worth trying. As for adult literature, I remember how proud I was when I completed my first novel in Swedish (it was a translation of Norwegian author Erlend Loe’s enjoyable novel “Naïve. Super.”) and how eager I was to keep reading literature in Swedish. A mistake many of my students make is to feel they have to understand every single word they read, so they get bogged down by looking up each difficult word they encounter when reading and they eventually give up, believing they just aren’t good enough yet to try reading in English. However, many words can be understood from the context, and guessing often is good enough. I recommend only looking up words you can’t figure out from the context or words that seem particularly interesting for whatever reason. If you stumble across a foreign word in context enough times, you’ll gradually get a good understanding of what it means and how it is used by native speakers. Also, reading teaches you grammar, almost without you being aware of it. You see what is accepted as correct and that soon influences how you write and speak in the foreign language.

While I am not so impressed by much of what is shown on television and don’t even own one, I do think that watching tv or movies can sometimes be a useful way to improve language skills. Depending on what is available where you live, start by watching a program or film in which the people speak your native language but the subtitles are in the language you are learning. Subtitles are generally simplified versions of what is being said, which makes them easy and fast to read. Eventually you should try to tune out or turn off the spoken language and only concentrate on the subtitles. Next, you can watch programs in the foreign language and have the subtitles either in your native language or else in the same language you are learning (DVDs often seem to have this option these days), for extra reinforcement. Besides helping you improve your skills in general, watching television or movies can also expose you to different dialects, which is also important. Some of my students definitely appreciated the idea that they were doing homework by watching tv shows in English!

One of the biggest challenges, I think, in learning a new language, is being able to understand people on the radio. Talking to people in person or listening to someone on tv or in a film is difficult, too, but at least there you are helped by the way their mouth moves, other facial expressions, and body language. When listening to the radio, you only have the voice to go by and people often speak more quickly on the radio, so it important to train your listening skills from early on. One semester, I brought in a CD of news, interviews, and other radio programs in English to one of my intermediate classes. The students were pretty confident about their language skills and they spoke without too much hesitation, but they nearly all failed to answer the questions on the worksheets I gave them about the radio programs. They needed to listen to each show at least 5 times before they started understanding what was being said. But when I incorporated using the same CD in class with a group of students who were just beginning to learn English, I found that they were soon able to summarize each radio program after hearing it just once, and that they could answer most of the questions correctly after listening to it twice. So I recommend buying a similar CD or else making one yourself by recording radio shows and listening to them multiple times. Some countries have easy-language radio shows specifically for foreigners, so you could begin with those. Unless you are planning to just read in the new language, being able to understand what people are saying is an essential skill to possess.

In the next post, I’ll give some more tips for learning a new language or for improving your skills in another language.

Translation as Anthropology

As someone who likes to read anthropology texts for fun but who unfortunately only took one anthropology course in school (typically for me, it was a class on the anthropology of food!), I really appreciated this quote from Dr. Rajendra Singh, a linguist at the University of Montreal:

“[T]ranslation is best defined as that branch of anthropology in which the field comes to the investigator’s office.”

This is such a succinct way of describing the translator’s job and the necessity of understanding the cultures behind the languages involved in a translation. Too many people believe translation is simply a matter of finding a replacement in the target language for each word in the source language and they forget how much more is required of the translator. Let’s be anthrotranslators, researching every aspect of the languages and cultures we work with.

Translating Mahfouz

In yesterday’s New York Times, there was an article about Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, who has just passed away. The article briefly mentions the issue of translation:

For English-language translators and readers, Arabic presents special difficulties: the dialogue sounds overwrought, the descriptions stilted. As Brad Kessler wrote in a 1990 article for The New York Times Magazine: “Mahfouz writes in the florid classical Arabic, which is roughly the equivalent of Shakespearean English.”

Peter Theroux, the American translator of several major Arab novelists, wrote about completing a new version of “Children of the Alley” in 1996: “Readers of Mahfouz in any language are in thrall to his magic. The warmth of Mahfouz’s characters, the velocity of his storytelling, his gift for fluent dialogue and telling details are unique in modern Arabic literature.”

So how should a translator best work with Mahfouz’s texts? By using Shakespearean English? Or by modernizing the language? Or some combination of methods?

Review of "Writing Between the Lines"

A review I wrote of “Writing Between the Lines: Portraits of Canadian Anglophone Translators” has just been published in the Danforth Review. The book is a collection of essays about Canadian translators who translate from French to English. Most of them see their work as a way to conquer the political and cultural divides that separate French-speaking Canadians from English-speaking ones.

As a bilingual country, Canada has two distinct languages and cultures, and this of course extends to the literary realm as well. Historically, there has been little contact between anglophone and francophone writers, but as a new book, Writing Between the Lines: Portraits of Canadian Anglophone Translators, describes, the work of dedicated translators has helped change this.
Writing Between the Lines is made up of twelve essays, each focusing on a specific French-to-English translator who has influenced Canada’s literary scene. An unfortunate limitation of this book is that there are no portraits of people who translate to French (with the exception of Susanne de Lotbiniére-Harwood, who translates feminist works in both directions). As the essays emphasize, translation is a necessity, especially in a country with two or more cultures separated by languages, religious and/or political beliefs, and ways of viewing the world. So by leaving out francophone translators, this book seems to have missed its own point. Despite this, however, Writing Between the Lines does have plenty to offer any reader interested in translation or Canadian literature, because, as the introduction says, this is the “first comprehensive, inside view of the practice of anglophone literary translation in Canada.” The essays give biographical information on the translators, review their work and their working processes, discuss some of the authors they have translated, and explain what the translators have done for Canadian literature.

Most of the translators profiled also produce, or produced, their own writing, as poets, novelists, academics, journalists, essayists, and one pornographer. This suggests that writers make the most successful literary translators, although this isn’t inevitably the case. But though they have creative writing in common, they certainly don’t share the same techniques for literary translation or opinions on what a translator’s role is. For readers not familiar with translation, the book might be an appealing surprise in that way, because the translators have a variety of different viewpoints on translation, and the essays make it clear that along the scale ranging from strict literalness (faithfulness to the original text) to total freedom (the translator takes liberties), there is no one perfect method of balance. Some translators featured in this volume, such as Patricia Claxton, believe that it is their responsibility, even a civic duty, to be loyal to the original author and his text and intention. William Hume Blake, for example, thought of translation as a way of preserving and sharing a specific sort of French Canadian life with English-speakers and thus used “Gallicized vocabulary and turns of phrase,” rather than anglicizing them for his audience. Others, including poet D.G. Jones, who helped found the bilingual literary magazine ellipse, see translation more as a transformation of the text that sets fewer restrictions on the translator. And Sheila Fischman believes translators and the original authors should get “equal billing,” which suggests something about how she sees her position in the creation of a text. Meanwhile, Barbara Godard has a somewhat different way of working; she includes a translator’s preface, not agreeing with the “concept of translator and translation as transparent.” In the prefaces, she explain the author’s ideas and style, and her choices as the translator.

These translators also choose, or accept, to work on very different types of assignments. de Lotbiniére-Harwood only translates writing by women, as a “political activity” that makes “the feminine subject reciprocally visible in two cultures.” Similarly, Ray Ellenwood sees translation in a political light and has therefore worked on documents as diverse as political satire, an artistic manifesto, and surrealist works. Linda Gaboriau has translated more than sixty plays, while John Glassco translated thirty-seven of the fifty poets in the anthology The Poetry of French Canada in Translation, and Patricia Claxton has translated, among other things, books on the history of Québec and articles by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

No matter how they go about their work or what topics or genres they prefer to translate, all the translators seemed agreed on why they were translating. Not only do they want to introduce great Québec novelists, playwrights, and poets to those who can’t read French, but they also see translation as the way to “bridge the cultural and political gap between English Canada and Québec,” and literature as a step towards bringing anglophone and francophone Canada closer together.

Cows Have Dialects, Too

In the past few posts, we've looked at dialects and how to translate them. Someone then sent me a Swedish article about how cows, in common with birds and dogs, are thought to have dialects as well. Cows apparently have distinctive moos. Here is an article in English about the phenomenon. Good thing we don't have to worry about translating different cow dialects!

Update: See this blog post for more information about the cow dialects and how the story got blown out of proportion. Thanks to Sarah for pointing this out!

Killing a Mockingbird or Killing a Dialect?

In the last two posts, we have looked at dialects and how to translate them. Now I’d like to show a few examples from the Swedish translation of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“To Kill a Mockingbird” uses both standard English and southern American, or more specifically, Alabaman, dialect. When the characters speak, their dialect is represented by non-standard spelling and grammar. Of course, there is no Alabaman dialect in Sweden, but there is a southern dialect that could be used, or the spelling and grammar of certain words could be changed to reflect the original.

The first example is the word ‘scuppernongs,’ which appears on page 44 in the English text. I’ve gathered that this is a word for a sort of grape that grows in the South. The Swedish translation, on page 44, is ‘persikor,’ or ‘peaches.’ If my understanding of ‘scuppernogs’ is right, then not only does this translation ignore the dialect, but it also changes the meaning of the word, and thus changes how a reader pictures the story. This kind of grape may not grow elsewhere, but at least a translation could call it ‘grapes,’ or ‘druvor’ in Swedish. It’s as though the translator thought that grapes don’t exist in Sweden.

To move on to a whole sentence, on page 14, a character asks ‘Ain’t you ever waked up at night and heard him, Dill?’ Clearly, neither ‘ain’t’ nor ‘waked’ are standard English. Ideally, this would be shown in translation, even if the target language doesn’t necessarily have a similar dialect. But the Swedish text uses standard Swedish. On page 16 of the Swedish version, which is entitled ‘Dödssynden,’ the same sentence reads ‘Har du aldrig vaknat på natten och hört honom, Dill?’ Translated back to English, the sentence is ‘Have you never woken up at night and heard him, Dill?’ Some sense of who these characters are and where they live has been lost along with their dialect. To really show the characters and their way of speaking, perhaps a better translation could have been, ‘Har du aldrig vaknade på natten och hört honom, Dill?’ Now the word ‘vaknat’ has been changed to the incorrect ‘vaknade,’ making the back-translation ‘Have you never woke up at night and heard him, Dill?’ Of course, the sentence could be played with a little more, maybe by changing the word ‘har,’ but even just using ‘vaknade’ or making a similar change would make the translation clearly strike a native Swedish speaker as incorrect and would help the reader understand the characters better.

A longer example comes from page 213 in the English text:

Not the same chiffarobe you busted up?’ asked Atticus.
The witness smiled. ‘Naw, suh, another one. Most as tall as the room. So I done what she told me, an’ I was just reachin’ when the next thing I knows she – she’d grabbed me round the legs, grabbed me round th’ legs, Mr. Finch. She scared me so bad I hopped down an’ turned the chair over – that was the only thing, only furniture ‘sturbed in that room, Mr. Finch, when I left it. I swear it ‘fore God.’

Here is the Swedish translation, from page 184:

“Inte samma chiffarob som du högg sönder?” frågade Atticus.
Vittnet log. “Nä, sir, en annan en. Nästan lika hög som rummet. Så jag gjorde som han sa åt mej, och jag skulle just sträcka mej opp när det nästa jag kände var att hon – hon tog tag om mina ben, högg med om benen, mr Finch. Hon skrämde mej så dant så jag hoppa ner och välte stolen – det var det enda, det var den enda möbel som var flyttad på i det rummet, mr Finch, när jag lämna det. Det svär jag inför Gud.”

This translation is different from the previous example since it does not simply use standard Swedish. Here, the translator has chosen for some words to represent spoken rather than written Swedish, such as by using ‘mej’ instead of the correct ‘mig’ and ‘opp’ rather than ‘upp.’ Another choice the translator made was to use some incorrect grammar. ‘Hoppa’ should be ‘hoppade,’ for example, and ‘lämna’ should be ‘lämnade.’ Otherwise, the character speaks more or less acceptable standard Swedish, with some English mistakes or other dialect features ‘corrected’ in Swedish translation, including how ‘suh’ is made ‘sir,’ ‘done’ becomes ‘gjorde,’ back-translated as ‘did,’ and there are no shortened words, such as ‘an’’ or ‘‘sturbed,’ in the Swedish version. My opinion is that a little more should have been done to clearly show the reader that this character has a specific, non-standard English dialect, without mocking his way of speaking.

So the main choices this translator made were standardizing the language, orthographically showing how characters speak, and using incorrect grammar. Personally, I think standardization generally is not the correct way to translate dialect. Orthographic and grammatical changes – which are included in what I called in the previous post the method of translation by equivalency of meaning – work well here, but they don’t quite do enough in the Swedish translation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I’d be interested to know what choices the translators of this novel to other languages made.

Translating Dialects

In the last post, we looked generally at dialects. But whether we can confidently define what a dialect is doesn’t necessarily matter when faced with a translation that includes something we believe to be a dialect. So what do we do?

Of course, we can simply ignore the dialect and translate it as standard language in the target language. That’s an easy, if not faithful, solution, and in general should probably be avoided. An author, after all, has chosen to use dialect for a reason, and dismissing that choice isn’t respectful of the author or his work. However, for some languages, ignoring the dialect may in fact be the only solution. Not all cultures represent spoken language as it truly is in the written language; for some languages, only a standard written style is acceptable. So there may be no actual way to express dialect in the target language, or the written language may have a strict style that does not correspond to the spoken and thus does not allow for the expression of dialects.

But if we decide to translate the dialect and believe it is possible to do so, what choices do we have? I believe some of the main methods available to us are to translate geographically, socioeconomically, or by equivalency of meaning. As with most things in translation, there is no one right way; each choice a translator makes is based on the context and the situation, and what may work in one translation could be completely inappropriate for another one.

A geographic translation means that we choose a roughly equivalent region in the target culture and pick one of its dialects. This doesn’t mean that the stereotypes and feelings that are attached to the dialect in the source language and culture will be translated correctly, although of course that could happen. If a book has a southern American dialect, for example, a Swedish translator might choose a southern Swedish (Scanian) dialect. The people who speak both these dialects are stereotyped to some extent as being “country” or “slow,” so translating the southern American dialect with a Scanian dialect could create some of the same feelings or impressions for readers.

Obviously, though, a geographic translation of this kind can be a problem when a translator is faced with source and target countries that have different sorts of regions or different stereotypes about those regions, or with languages that are spoken in more than one country. Should an Egyptian Arabic dialect be translated to a German dialect from Germany, Austria, or Switzerland? Or does that depend on where the publisher, or audience, of the translation is located?

By translating socioeconomically, I mean that a translator working with, say, an upper class dialect in the source text chooses an upper class dialect in the target language. The source and target dialects don’t have to be geographically related, although obviously that could be the case, but they simply represent the same approximate social and/or economic class. If the original author uses a lower-class dialect from northern England, the Slovenian translator may not be able to find an appropriate dialect in northern Slovenia, but instead can use a lower-class dialect from another region. Translating socioeconomically can be challenging if the source and target cultures have very different populations and/or social systems, and thus different class-based dialects.

A dialect may create a certain feeling or idea for the readers of the original text that is not quite possible to get across to readers of the translated text if the dialect is translated geographically or socioeconomically. In that case, a translator can decide to translate by meaning or feeling. If an author chooses a dialect to suggest a character is unintelligent, or whiny, or especially happy, an equivalent dialectical representation can be picked in the target language. However, not all languages have dialects with the same stereotypes, and not all people who speak a language have the same understanding of which dialect is considered cranky, or serious, or silly, and this translation technique will be unsuccessful and possibly even confusing if readers don’t understand what is meant or implied by the choice of dialect.

Clearly, there are pitfalls and difficulties associated with each of these methods of translating dialects, and translators must attempt to find a way to express the dialect in the target language without exaggerating how it is used or what is means. Dialects have to be translated carefully and judiciously, so that they portray the characters, location, and/or story in the source document without mocking them.

In the next post, I will show a few examples of translated dialect from the Swedish translation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Dialects

I was recently in Norway, and I found that for the most part, it was perfectly possible to use Swedish to communicate with Norwegians. After all, the two Germanic languages are closely related and some people even claim that they aren’t distinct languages, but are instead, along with Danish, simply dialects of a Scandinavian language.

Dialects can be difficult to define, and not just because of linguistic reasons. There can also be cultural, political, and historical reasons for why some people prefer to believe that their language is very different from another. For example, I’ve taught students who identified themselves as Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian. They admitted that their various languages are mutually intelligible, but they firmly insisted that the languages were nevertheless distinct and that this fact should not be misunderstood.

So there are a lot of fascinating and difficult questions to consider. What makes something a language rather than a dialect? How many words or pronunciations have to be different before one language is said to now be two or more? How must the cultures behind the languages distinguish themselves so that the native speakers start to see themselves as separate? And who decides what is a dialect and what is a language?

Here are a few interesting sources of information about dialects:

I recommend Fredrik Lindström’s tv show about Swedish dialects, Svenska Dialektmysterier.

You can listen to 100 different Swedish dialects on SweDia.

In the US, PBS ran a show on American dialects, entitled Do You Speak American?

For more on American dialects, there is the American Dialect Society.

Finally, to learn about dialects in the UK, see the BBC Voices site.

The next post will look at translating dialects.

The First Printed English Translation

According to the Writer’s Almanac, yesterday was the birthday of the man who first printed a book in English, William Caxton. We translators can be proud of the fact that the book Mr. Caxton printed was a translation! This means that English translations have been printed since 1475.

Here is the quote from yesterday’s edition of the Writer’s Almanac:

Today is believed to be the birthday of the first man ever to print a book in English, William Caxton, born in Kent, England (1422). He was a wealthy trader and merchant, and also a part-time linguist and translator. He was living in Cologne, Germany, when he translated a book about the history of Troy. The printing press had been invented about twenty-five years earlier, but it had only recently started to spread beyond Germany. Caxton realized that the new technology of printing would make the job of distributing his books a lot easier. So instead of copying the book by hand, he printed the book he had translated about Troy in 1475. He eventually went back to England, where he established the first English printing press. He printed all the available English literature, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1478). For a long time, people in England called printed books "Caxtons."

Fits Like a Glove

Writer Alma Guillermoprieto said: "The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again."

Choosing One Book

In the interview mentioned in the last post, Alma Guillermoprieto says, “Another magical translator, Alistair Reid, whose versions of Neruda and Borges are like the Holy Law of translated poetry as far as I'm concerned, told me once that every writer who speaks a foreign tongue should translate at least one book he/she loves into his/her (how are we ever going to get out of this pronoun dilemma in English?) native language.”

What book would you translators choose and why? It's interesting to think about, but also a little sad, because it often seems that the books we most want to see translated to another language are the books that publishers don't believe in and won't accept, making the translation a real "labor of love."

Dancing a Translation

In an interview by/with translator Esther Allen, the writer Alma Guillermoprieto says, “Translation is a notoriously thankless profession: there is absolutely no money in it; it involves a severe submersion of the self into another; the hours are long and you get about as much recognition for your efforts as the telephone repairman.” Ms. Guillermoprieto then asks her translator what the satisfactions are and Ms. Allen replies, “(T)o write in a certain language is to adopt many of the givens of the people who speak it. Translating is a way of going beyond that, reaching a different context—which is especially important in the face of the global dominance of English. As for the “severe submersion of the self”—you make it sound like a mortification of the flesh! But in fact, what makes translation so enjoyable—which is why I do it, and why most translators do it, I suppose—is that it combines the pleasure of reading with that of writing. I’ve always translated books I admire and care about, like yours; translation takes you much farther into a book than simply reading it ever could. It's the difference between listening to a piece of music and performing it—dancing it, I'm tempted to say.”

As Ms. Allen says, translation takes you “much farther” into a text than just reading it; in a way, translators are, or should be, the best, most careful readers and performers of a text.

Dance on, translators!

Multilingualism

To complement Penny Milbouer’s post, here is an excerpt from Tore Janson’s book “Speak.” In this excerpt, Mr. Janson discusses multilingualism and the importance and necessity of knowing more than one language.

Learning Languages in the United States by Guest Blogger Penny Milbouer

German to English translator Penny Milbouer has generously agreed to be the first guest blogger on Brave New Words. Ms. Milbouer is currently a paralegal in the health section of a large, international law firm. She holds an undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College and received her doctorate from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Ms. Milbouer translated into English the memoirs of Michael Wieck, A Childhood Under Hitler and Stalin, Memoirs of a "Certified" Jew, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Here Ms. Milbouer discusses reasons for the lack of language education in the United States.

Learning Languages in the United States by Penny Milbouer:

One of the first things an educated European notices about Americans is that most of us do not speak or even care to learn to speak a language other than English. Immigrants, understandably, struggle to learn English and often their children speak little or only a word or two of the parents' tongue. Why, someone asked me recently, are foreign languages so poorly taught or not taught at all in so many schools and universities here? Although much has changed over the last thirty years since I first started teaching university-level German, much has not changed: our geography, our history, our culture, our attitudes towards acquiring fluency in a second language, our misunderstanding about what bilingualism is, our politics, even our religious fundamentalism.

There are many reasons why foreign languages traditionally are not taught at all or are taught reluctantly in this country. Here are a few reasons:

1. Geography: We are a large, large country (consider: the state of Texas is the size of France; we cover six time zones). Unlike as in Europe where speaking a foreign language, no matter how badly, is necessary if one travels even the shortest distance, many Americans are really shocked when they travel to, say, Mexico and are confronted with Spanish signs and Spanish speakers everywhere.

2. History: Speaking a foreign tongue is not seen as a desired accomplishment. Speaking a foreign language is associated with being an immigrant, and usually a poor immigrant.

3. Culture: "Everyone speaks English anyway." And generally that English is American English. English is already the lingua franca of many industries, such as in aviation. Even if both the controller and the pilot are Chinese in China, the language used is English. It's the lingua franca in much of the business world; in the oil industry; in the import/export business (a Taiwanese broker of raw materials will e-mail his seller in Peru to bid on the contract -- in English and then sell the raw material, by e-mail contract in English, to the manufacturer in China). If everyone speaks English anyway, parents aren't going to insist on a program in the schools and certainly not a broad or deep program. School boards are hard pressed to fund legislated mandates and foreign language is rarely mandated.

4. Attitude: There is very strong pressure to conform. The pressure is especially strong and unchallenged in places where there aren't many foreign-language speakers or where there are foreign-language speakers and they do not belong to the economic elite. There is something vaguely subversive and unpatriotic, even dangerous, if one speaks a foreign language fluently because it is somehow odd, not normal. This isn't unique to the United States. It's just more widespread and perhaps more open. When I lived in Canada, a Francophone friend of mine was traveling to western Canada and was told "to speak white."

5. Misunderstanding: Many Americans assume that "bilingual programs" assure bilingual fluency. Where Spanish and English are taught well, that is true. However, too many programs aim to turn monolingual Spanish-speaking children into more or less monolingual English-speaking children. Bad pedagogy and bad curriculum planning and a lack of understanding of what it takes to learn a foreign language is common. All too often a student who has had one or two years of high school Spanish will switch to French, ending up then with only two years of French. You simply do not learn more than just enough to forget in two years. When I taught at the university level, students were just flabbergasted that after four years of high school French at one of the better public schools, they could not place out of beginning French. Needless to say, this is discouraging and the student simply gives up and takes a communications course in "Listening." However, the most stunning example of misunderstanding what it means to study a foreign language I encountered when I was speaking to the vice president of the state university where I was teaching. "Oh yes," he told me proudly, after he had closed down the foreign language program, "Rest assured, we still have our language arts program." [Students who want certification to become elementary school teachers must learn how to teach reading or "language arts."]

6. Politics: Educational politics often mean that many high schools don't teach foreign languages or no more than two years of a foreign language. Universities no longer have the luxury of requiring even a two-year minimum of a foreign language to enter college; they would have to reject otherwise bright and brilliant candidates. Therefore, many universities, even elite, private ones, have dropped the requirement. Most universities no longer require evidence of any level of mastery to graduate. If universities do not require a foreign language and if there is no state requirement, guidance counselors at the high school level are under no pressure to encourage their college-bound pupils to sign up for a foreign language.

There are also the politics of resentment and fear. The recent Congressional resolution to make English the official language of the United States may have its merits, but it is embedded in the current debate over illegal immigration from Central America. One recent news story reported that the owner of a popular Philadelphia cheesesteak joint posted a sign that reminded customers they are in America and only orders in English would be filled.

7. Religious Fundamentalism: "The Bible is written in English." This is one of the least excusable reasons for not having foreign languages in our school curriculum but for many a perfectly valid one. Ma Ferguson, governor of Texas in the 1920s, long ago but not long enough, said, "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me." This attitude certainly was alive and well when I was teaching at the university level twenty-five years ago. Given the current religious climate in the United States, this belief that God speaks English -- that is, American English -- can easily be found today.

Understanding Languages

I recently noticed the following quote:

“You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.” -Ronald Searle

If that’s the case, why are some countries, notably the United States, reluctant to spend time and money on language education for children? This also harkens back to the point made by David Rumsey in the last post about how the U.S. market views translation in a different way than many other countries do.

The United States’ view of language education will be the topic of the next post, which will be written by Brave New Words’ first guest blogger.

The American Market

Thinking about some of the differences between the U.S. and other countries, as mentioned in a recent post, reminded me of a lecture I heard at the conference I attended in May.

Translator David Rumsey spoke about the American market, and some of his comments were quite interesting.

The United States has a unilingual worldview, Mr. Rumsey said, but despite this, $25 billion are spent annually on translation, primarily between English and French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The demand for Asian languages is growing, as is the demand for some other languages, such as Arabic.

He said the US market is very large and underdeveloped. Some of the reasons for this may be because of what he termed the common U.S. myths on translation. Mr. Rumsey mentioned that many Americans aren’t very educated about what translation is or why it is needed, which is why some people there believe that translation is simply “typing in a foreign language,” as Mr. Rumsey phrased it, and others think anyone can do (say, the secretary whose grandpa came from Puerto Rico, or the Chinese chef at a restaurant), and still others have heard that there’s translation software that’s just as good as, or possibly better than, actual people. About Scandinavia in particular, Mr. Rumsey said that Americans tend to think of Scandinavians as being educated, affluent, and high-tech, so they don’t see the need to translate their instruction manuals or other documents to Scandinavian languages. Everyone here speaks English, they assume.

To combat all these incorrect ideas, Mr. Rumsey suggested that translators and translation agencies need to demystify translation, provide information about different languages and cultures, explain why translation is beneficial and profitable in the long-term, and reduce the risks for customers. By reducing the risks, he meant that translators and agencies should be prepared to do more for American customers than they would for others, such as providing free consulting, editing, having third-party reviewers, and other such things. It’s interesting to consider how much translators would need to or be willing to provide these kinds of services for customers in other countries.

Do translators who work in the U.S. or in the U.S. and other countries agree with this appraisal of the United States? Do you provide extra services for your American customers, or do agencies that you work for do so?

P.S. Mr. Rumsey’s presentation from the conference is now up on his website, so you can read more there.

More on Literature and Literary Translation

After thinking about different types of literature, read this interview with several literary translators to learn a little about the process of literary translation.

Thank you to Erika Dreifus for sending me this link!

Differences Between Swedish and American Literature

In the past few posts, translator Ken Schubert shared some of his ideas about translation and translators with us. While talking to him about literary translation, he mentioned an interesting view on the differences between Swedish and American literature and film.

KS: Breaking into the Swedish-English literary market is very difficult. Only a handful of books are commissioned each year by a British or American publisher for translation. If you manage to land one of those jobs, you'll get paid, but it's not enough to live on.

BJE: Why do you think there is so little interest in books from Scandinavia, or in translated literature in general? Are Americans against translated work (lack of interest in foreign cultures, etc) or do they simply have enough writing there as it is?

KS: Beyond the fact that people would rather read non-translated works (for good reason) and there is an enormous output of literature in the US, I think Americans would generally be put off by the more complex and less identifiable plots in Swedish fiction. Plus Swedish authors are not as well edited as American authors, so it's more difficult to maintain a consistent voice.

BJE: In regard to "the more complex and less identifiable plots in Swedish fiction" – you apparently see a major difference between Swedish and American (English too, perhaps?) literature. Can you name some examples of this? Or offer a theory of why this is? Also, why is there less editing in Sweden?

KS: In recent years, I've been more a student of Swedish film than literature, so I can talk about that more easily. Swedish film, regardless of quality otherwise, is most often based on a psychological issue. The plot is secondary. A good example are the Martin Beck police films, which aren't even considered particularly artistic. What you always remember about them is the interactions between the main characters and what is going on in their own minds and lives in relation to the particular crime. If a policeman is investigating domestic violence, his own past relationships with women come up, etc. When it comes to editing, I think it's the same phenomenon that we face as translators of business texts. Swedish workplaces are more decentralized than in the Anglo-Saxon world, so there is often not someone with ultimate responsibility for individual tasks.

BJE: So, to be extremely general and stereotypical, I can summarize what you just said as American films are more about action and Swedish films about thinking, and this is perhaps true of literature, too. Do you have any theories about why this difference might have arisen?

KS: I don't know that much about American films anymore, but having grown up in America, competition and individual achievement are key cultural values. In that context, action is a more natural expression of those values. Sweden is more of a collective, consensus-based culture, so that the more general psychological sources of agreement and conflict among people become more relevant.

What do other translators think about this? Are there similarly pronounced differences between the U.S. (or other English-speaking cultures) and other countries?

If there are such differences, shouldn’t there to be more translated literature, rather than less, so that readers (or film viewers) can learn about another culture?

Let me know what you think about this interesting topic.

An Interview with Ken Schubert Continued: On Advice for New Translators

The conversation with translator Ken Schubert
is continued.

BJE: If you could describe the ideal translator, what qualities/background/experiences/education would s/he have?

KS: I think the ideal translator would have as broad a background as possible, love the process of translation and be particularly attuned to nuances in his or her native language. I also think that the ideal translator would have the ability to comprehend a text as a whole and to maintain a single voice (even when the source text fails to do so – unless it's intentional, of course).

BJE: I wonder if you have any general advice/comments for new translators. How can they find jobs? Where do they look? What should they keep in mind while translating? What do you like most about translating?

KS: Probably the best ways for new translators to find jobs is to stay in touch with other translators through a translator's association and to contact lots of agencies. That will provide you with the experience and contacts to find direct customers. Customers will start coming to you after a while based on recommendations from other translators and customers. Advertising is generally too expensive and ineffective. Beyond what I've talked about, probably the most important thing to keep in mind is accuracy and neatness. Double check all names and numbers and make sure that you haven't inadvertently missed some of the source text. No matter how good your translation is, the customer will tend to overlook it if you make sloppy mistakes. Run a spell check on the final translation no matter how long it takes. Use Internet search engines as much as possible, but don't believe everything you see there and make sure you understand how the search engines work. I also recommend using a translation tool like Trados or Deja Vu. That creates an easily accessible database of your previous translations and helps structure individual assignments. A text looks a lot less daunting when you can use a translation tool to break it down into its constituent parts. And perhaps the most important thing is to be professional with your customers – be firm about your sense of what translation is all about, but always be willing to discuss what you've done and make appropriate changes.

BJE: Ken, thank you very much for your thoughtful answers and for being so generous with your time and experience.

An Interview with Ken Schubert Continued: On Being Literal

The conversation with translator Ken Schubert is continued.

BJE: On your website, you write, "In fact, many everyday expressions are not conducive to a direct translation, but require a creative effort on the part of the translator to convey their true sense." Do you have any examples of such expressions?

KS: There are thousands of examples of everyday expressions that can't be translated directly. The first one that came to mind when you asked the question was "det gäller att." One of my favorite translations is "the trick is to," but of course it's not applicable in most cases. One good approach is to leave the phrase out completely in English.

BJE: Leaving the phrase out completely can be a good solution, but do you ever have clients complain because they feel you haven't been literal enough? How closely do you usually follow a text?

KS: I've had very few complaints about lack of literalness. I generally follow the Swedish text sentence by sentence, though I might combine two sentences or make one sentence into two. Beyond that, I am extremely un-literal in terms of sentence structure or the individual words used. I try to translate technical terms literally, but otherwise I try to ignore the particular word and sentence structure used in Swedish and get to what is being said instead.

BJE: About literalness, that is often a problem new translators have. They are afraid of deviating too much from the text. They feel that being faithful to the text means being completely faithful to each word, each way of saying things, etc. Then they end up with problems where their translation sounds forced and foreign. What advice to you have to them, or to any translator who can't quite let go, as it were?

KS: I think each translator has to develop an approach that feels best to them. At one point early in my career, I would translate the entire text fairly quickly and then spend a lot of time modifying it later. Now I generally spend a good deal of time on each sentence initially and make minimal changes later. The first approach was based on a fairly literal translation that gradually became less literal with each modification. The second approach is based on trying to grasp the meaning of the sentence the first time without getting hung up on the words. The second approach has become natural for me now, but it's still more time-consuming and arduous than a literal approach. So it requires a lot of patience and dedication to what you're doing. Customers won't necessarily notice the difference. And as much as I like my approach, the most important thing is consistency and remaining loyal to the source text, however you define loyalty. I don't like translation that gratuitously adds or subtracts something just because it feels good. For me, anything you "change" has to be because you think it more accurately reflects what is meant by the source text or because it is "what would be said" in a corresponding situation in English.

BJE: Your comment on literalness reminds me of something on your website. You wrote, "Far more than a collection of symbols, a language is a dynamic, complex structure – an organism – that survives and evolves through a constant interplay between the whole and the parts." Can you expand on your perspective on language and translation?

KS: Without going into a long exposition on language, I'll just say that the structure of a language tends to determine the words that are used and not vice versa. That's why a 4-year-old child understands most of what is being said, not because their vocabulary is so large but because they've grasped the essence of the structure. I actually experimented with that when learning French over the past few years. I listened to French radio for a couple of years without looking up a single word. Although I couldn't have repeated literally what was being said, I understood the essence of what was being talked about. For translators, that means that the sentence structure or flow of logic in the Swedish text may not correspond to what works in English. Of course, we're fairly limited by the fact that we usually can't move sentences around between paragraphs. Sometimes it's necessary though. One common difference between English and Swedish is that English tends to present the most vital information about a phenomenon the first time it's mentioned, whereas Swedish will present it gradually. A tiny example I ran across today went something like, "XX is a very useful tool for researchers. This database has been in use for many years..." In English, you would say, "The XX database is a very useful tool for researchers...."

BJE: When you say "structure" could you be specific about what you mean? How much freedom can/should translators take with structure?

KS: I was using structure to refer to a particular language as an organism that follows certain principles. As native speakers, we may not be conscious of the principles, but we formulate our words and sentences in accordance with them. The principles of a foreign language may be more obvious to us. One of my main tasks as a translator as I see it is to allow the way that English generates words and phrases to inform my translation. Of course, I'm limited to a certain extent by the need to express a particular thought from the Swedish text, even if the thought isn't "English" in nature or would naturally appear in another part of the text in English. So you have to make compromises as a translator. But again, I don't think that translators should take any "freedom" with structure. They should look for the structure that best reflects what is meant in Swedish and that is most natural in English, given the constraints they are working under. In other words, the non-literal approach is actually more rigorous than the literal approach because your ideal is "how would an English writer express themselves in this specific situation."

BJE: Yes, and that is what is so challenging. Sometimes a translator can get so caught up in the way something is said in Swedish (or whatever the source language is), that it is difficult to figure out how an English writer would have said it. You have to be creative and you have to keep your native language (the target language) fresh, so it still feels natural to you.

KS: I have to say that translation never truly becomes easy if you take it seriously, because it poses new challenges at each step along the way. And you're still faced by the impossibility of truly capturing the entire meaning of the original. Frequently a translation is "better" than the original in terms of being more understandable conceptually, but it never fully captures the full spontaneity of the way we speak our native languages.

This conversation will be continued in the next post.

An Interview with Ken Schubert: On Relating Translation to Your Own Life

Recently, I had the chance to discuss translation with translator Ken Schubert. In the next few posts, I’ll include pieces from our conversation.Mr. Schubert, who is originally from the Chicago area, moved to Sweden in 1992. Please see his website
for more information about him and his services.

Brett Jocelyn Epstein: Ken, you started your career as a teacher, and have also been a computer programmer, copy writer, and court assistant. How did you get into translation and how do your other background experiences help you as a translator?

Ken Schubert: I started translating informally soon after I came to Sweden. It seemed the natural thing to do since I've always had a flair for writing. But I actually started doing it professionally as a means to get a work permit – I had been a student up that point, and that doesn't allow you to stay in Sweden long-term.
The key to being a good translator is to have a broad experience of life, both personally and professionally. For most of the texts I get, I can say "Been there, done that..." in one sense or another. It makes a big difference.

BJE: If you think "the key to being a good translator is to have a broad experience of life, both personally and professionally," what does that suggest for young translators who are just starting out?

KS: I'd say that they should focus on the kinds of texts that they can relate to in terms of their own lives and try to read widely and experience other areas. On the other hand, most of us have a vast reservoir of knowledge about many different areas by the time we've reached our late teens. Perhaps I should modify my original statement and say that the key to being a good translator is the ability to relate the text you're translating to your own experience, direct or indirect. If you stop to think about it, you're likely to find that you know a lot more about the subject, at least the essence of what it's about, than you give yourself credit for. Or maybe this has to do with the importance of approaching a text from a comprehensive understanding.

BJE: You've translated literary works as well as more technical documents, such as financial reports and contracts. What kinds of documents do you prefer to translate and why? What sort of translation do you find most challenging? And, to bring all this back to your last comment, how do feel you relate the texts you work on to your own experiences?

KS: There's a thrill to translating literary works. But I never managed to have any of them published, with the exception of a story in an anthology recently. So I wouldn't translate a literary work again unless I knew it was going to be published. Generally the satisfaction of translation is connected with knowing that somebody is going to read and benefit from it. Based on that, I'll take the rather radical position that all kinds of texts are equally challenging and satisfying. Often you have the same opportunity for creativity in an annual report or a letter from the Social Insurance Administration as you do in a novel. In neither case am I talking about creativity in terms of inventing something, but rather in finding ways to reflect the text you are translating in the deepest and most natural way. A phrase might be brilliant in an annual report and lousy in a novel, or vice versa – the challenge in either case is to establish a voice that conveys the spirit of the original and stick to it. As far as relating to my own experience, an annual report is generally about a company that sells a product or service that you have used or seen someone else use – in other words, it's about the everyday world. Of course, that's even more obvious in a novel, which is generally based on universal human experiences.

BJE: Many people find it very difficult, at least initially, to translate contracts, annual reports, instruction manuals, or other such technical documents. They may be experts in terms of the languages involved, and they may even have studied some technical subjects, but it is hard for them to, as you say, relate the texts to their own experiences. Do you have advice for them? Should they look at translation in a different way?

KS: One of the few things I never translate is instruction manuals, and that's probably because I'm lousy at reading them myself. The reason I like contracts and annual reports is that I can easily relate them to the everyday world. Another reason I'm good at contracts is that they are very logical, and I have a logical mind – I majored in math in college. So I would say that people who don't have that bent might want to avoid contracts. But I think that annual reports should be easily relatable for most translators once they get past the misconception that the reports are difficult or unusual in some way.

BJE: I absolutely agree that non-fiction, such as contracts or reports, can be creative and stimulating to work on. There is a thrill in finding the right words and make the text available to a wider audience.

This conversation will be continued in the next post.

Taking a Break

In the next few weeks, I’ll be taking a break from work, and that also means that I’ll be posting less frequently. But I’ll still put up new material, so do check back!

Sample Codes of Ethics

Just to go back briefly to the codes of ethics topic, here are a few sample codes that some translators’ associations have. I’ve looked at codes from a pretty interesting variety of groups.

American Translators Association

The National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators

The Association of Translators and Interpreters of Nova Scotia

Sveriges Facköversättarförening (Look under “Nyheter” at “God yrkessed,” if you can read Swedish)

Nearly all the codes I’ve seen emphasize that translators need to have good skills, not accept work that is beyond their abilities, keep information about clients and customers confidential, be accurate, and make other such expected suggestions. Only the ATA has any sort of code for clients and their guidelines are worth repeating:

“A. I will put my contractual relationship with translators and interpreters in writing and state my expectations prior to work.

“B. I will adhere to agreed terms, payment schedules, and agreed changes, and will not capriciously change job descriptions after work has begun.

“C. I will deal directly with the translator or interpreter about any dispute. If we cannot resolve a dispute, we will seek arbitration.

“D. I will not require translators or interpreters to do unpaid work for the prospect of a paid assignment.

“E. I will not use translators' or interpreters' credentials in bidding or promoting my business without their consent or without the bona fide intention to use their services.

“F. For translations for publication or performance over which I have direct control, I will give translators recognition traditionally given authors.”

It is important to note that even if some translation agencies join translators’ associations and follow these rules, the great majority of a translator’s clients are not members (unless said translator only works for agencies that are corporate members, though not all, or even most, agencies join such associations) and thus are not aware of these codes, nor feel bound to them. So the question remains for how to better educate clients and/or to only work for clients who treat their translators with the respect they deserve.

Car Doesn’t Run? Try Translation!

The last post was on internationalization and I mentioned advertising as something that needs to be carefully translated. I heard about an example of bad advertising translation in regard to Coca-Cola. The soda company tried to translate its “Coke adds life” ad to Japanese and ended up with “Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead.” Slight difference there!

Careful translation isn’t just limited to ads, but also affects product names and the instructions for using said products. A well-known example is the Chevrolet Nova car, which didn’t sell well in Mexico, since “no va” means “it doesn’t go.” Bill Bryson featured a funny example of poorly translated instructions in his book “The Mother Tongue.” On a package of Italian food, he found, “Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in an only couch.”

A Wall Street Journal article on the importance of translation and adaption offers the following statistics from a survey done by a translation company a few years ago: “Close to 50% simply tune out the message of an ad if it is poorly translated. About 65% said bad translations show a lack of caring about the consumer, while nearly a third said it would hinder their loyalty to a product.”

A company can’t afford to waste time, effort, and money on mistranslations. Consumers may laugh at bad translations of ads, product names, or instructions, but the real question is whether they ultimately will avoid the company’s products. Mistranslation simply “doesn’t go.”

Internationalization

In today’s A Word A Day e-newsletter, Wordsmith Anu Garg focused on the word “internationalization.” He offers two definitions:

“1. The act or process of making something international or placing
it under international control.

“2. Making a product or process suitable for use around the globe.”

Something too many companies don’t recognize is that translation is an important part of internationalization, especially in terms of the second definition. Making something suitable for use in another country is not “just replacing error messages from a new language,” as Mr. Garg refers to the process of making a computer program internationalized. Rather, it involves understanding the culture behind the language, and adjusting the language usage to that.

When I taught some English courses at a Swedish advertising agency, I was surprised when some of the students happened to mention that ads they made for the Swedish market had to be significantly changed for the Finnish market. Finland and Sweden were geographically so close, I thought, and Finland was historically influenced by Sweden and even had Swedish-speaking populations, so I didn’t see why the ads wouldn’t work there. But as a translator, I soon realized that this made sense. Finland’s culture is not the same as Sweden’s and even if the countries share some history and some similarities, a Swedish company that assumed it didn’t have to adapt its ads to Finland, or even translate them to Finnish, was not being respectful of its market, and would perhaps not do much business there.

Besides understanding the target market, which some companies have even started employing anthropologists for, a company interested in internationalization has to hire skilled translators as well. But the sheer number of poorly translated products, instructions, and ads, some featured on Jay Leno’s “Headlines” segment each week, makes it clear that many companies around the world haven’t quite figured out just what internationalization means yet. Hopefully they got Mr. Garg’s message today.

Virginia Woolf on Translating Humor

In "The Common Reader," Virginia Woolf wrote that "humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

As I said in the last post, translating humor is difficult, but apparently Ms. Woolf was not hopeful about a translator's ability to accomplish this hard task.

Translating Humor

Ethics is an important subject, and one we’ll come back to, but for a total change of pace, here is an article I noticed about translating comedy.

Humor is especially tricky to translate not only because different people and different cultures find different things funny, but also because of the fact that languages work in different ways. As the author of the article points out, English vocabulary and grammar “allow for endlessly amusing confusions of meanings.” For example, it is easy to play around with “tale” and “tail” in English and to make a joke based on how the two words sound the same but have different meanings, but such a joke wouldn’t work in Swedish (or in many other languages), as the Swedish translations for those words are not so similar. Incidentally, this sort of linguistic complexity, or confusion, depending on your point of view, is one reason so many people find it difficult to learn English, especially in terms of spelling and pronunciation.

Word play and humor add so much to a text and sometimes can be truly essential to the story or document, but they are incredibly difficult to translate well. When it comes to translating humor, there are three main choices. A translator can leave a joke or word play out entirely, which then of course may affect the meaning of the work and/or cause other changes to have to be made to the text. Or a translator can retain the joke but translate it literally, so the humor is lost but the words are retained. A footnote could possibly be added here to explain what the joke means in the source language, especially if the humor is important to the text and to the reader’s understanding of it. Finally, a translator can adapt it to the target language, creating a somewhat similar atmosphere or sense. Obviously, a translator has to make such a decision on a case by case basis and there is no simple rule for how to deal with these kinds of situations.

Codes of Ethics

To continue the discussion on ethics, let’s look at translators’ associations’ codes of ethics.

Many translators’ associations do have codes of ethics or recommendations for professional conduct, but often such rules are rather basic. Such codes might say that translators should only translate to their native languages, or that they should be certain that they possess the necessary knowledge (such as specific terminology) before they accept an assignment, or that they should protect the customer by not using the text to be translated, the client’s personal information, or any other details in any way that does not strictly have to do with the job. But these kinds of codes or rules, which deal mainly with practical issues and are thus helpful in that regard, generally leave out two important topics.

First, they give no advice or suggestions on what translators should do if they face ethically risky situations. For example, what should a translator do if asked to translate a text that is specifically supposed to show the client’s language skills? Maybe a client is applying for a job in France and has to be fluent in French but instead writes his application essay in English and asks a translator to translate it to French. Is that ethical? Some translators might argue that such a client is only hurting himself by misrepresenting his language skills and that it is not up to them to point this out to him, whereas others might feel that they have a responsibility to turn down the job. To take a more serious example, what should a translator do with a racist text? Some translators might say they have a duty to make all texts available in other languages while others might refuse to translate a racist document, claiming that it incites people to hatred and possibly violence. Codes of ethics are, unfortunately, basically silent about these very important issues.

The second major topic left out of codes of ethics is the role of the client. If translators are expected to follow rules, why shouldn’t their clients? Too often I hear stories – or experience such things myself – about customers who try to cheat translators by not paying the correct amount, or not paying on time, or who expect translators to do more than is actually the job of a translator. Some codes do have recommendations for employers of translators, but these recommendations are generally rather basic as well, and they're not that common anyway. Many translators’ associations have corporate members and it would make sense to have ethical rules that these agencies and companies need to uphold. Then, if they do not follow the rules, they can be fined, or removed from the association, or translators can be warned about them (there should be similar consequences for translators who do not follow their ethical codes, too). Too often, corporate clients take advantage of translators and this must change. I suspect that some clients simply don’t understand translation and therefore don’t know how to work with translators, so having regulations or advice for them would educate them and help both them and the translators who work for them.

While I think it is great that translators’ associations have some advice on ethics and other information on professional conduct, I also think these codes are too limited and need to be further developed.

Translators and Ethics

I’m going away for a few days again, so I thought I’d leave you with an important issue to think about – ethics.

What is a translator’s ethical role? Should translators simply translate whatever a customer gives us? Is it our job to simply make all texts available in other languages? Or do we have an obligation to speak up if we disagree with something or if we are concerned about the affect the translation might have on the audience?

Every week, in the New York Times Magazine, a man named Randy Cohen answers questions on ethical issue. I enjoy his column, which is called The Ethicist, and was happy to see a question on interpretation last Sunday.

Someone asked:

“Some time ago I was working as a court interpreter, translating what is said in court for the defendant and what the defendant says for the court. During a recess, the defendant confided that he did commit the crime and intended to take the stand and lie about it. I sought the advice of a colleague, who then informed the judge. As a result, I was chastised and lost my job. Was I wrong to divulge this information? E.N., Seattle”

Mr. Cohen responded:

“You were. Even if you made no explicit pledge of confidentiality, your role as an interpreter invites the defendant to confide in you, a relationship that does not terminate during a recess, out in the hall by the doughnut cart.

“The connection you've cultivated — emotionally, psychologically — endures. Unless you cautioned the defendant that you might disclose what he said, you abused his trust and your position.

“Robin G. Steinberg, executive director of the Bronx Defenders, a public defenders' organization in the Bronx (well, they would be), says of interpreters: "They become the only bridge between the attorney and the client. Those confidential communications can only occur with the interpreter, and those conversations are, indeed, confidential. There would be absolutely no way for a client to know that communications s/he makes just to the interpreter are subject to disclosure."

“Steinberg is right. A defendant naturally sees you as a quasi member of his legal team, someone to whom he can speak freely. Moreover, his requiring an interpreter indicates that he has limited facility with English and so is isolated in the court setting, making him even more apt to be candid with someone who speaks his language.

“What you could have done was speak to the defendant's lawyer. Generally, in the United States, if a client baldly announces an intention to lie on the stand, his lawyer is ethically bound to prevent him. Here in New York State, if a lawyer is unable to do that, he or she may, but is not required to, speak to the judge.

“While you acted badly, your colleague acted worse, imperiling the defendant and betraying your trust. I'm surprised that the judge spared him a sound thrashing, if that remedy is available under Seattle law.”


What do other translators and interpreters think of Mr. Cohen’s opinion? Do you agree with his view?

Have there been translation assignments you have refused to take or are there jobs you can imagine turning down for ethical reasons? I’d be very interested to hear other translators’ opinions on and experiences with ethical issues.

Selling Your Services and Negotiating

At the conference I attended last weekend, Ulla-Lisa Thordén gave an enthusiastic, energetic talk about selling your services.

She started off by mentioning two myths about selling. The first myth is that you have to be a born seller. Ms. Thordén said that you aren’t born anything; you have to become something, and being a good seller is really just being good at speaking and good at listening, both of which are skills that can be learned. The second myth she mentioned is that quality sells itself. Ms. Thordén said that unfortunately, quality has to be sold, and translators need to be able to explain what their particular abilities and skills are and why they are different from those of all the other translators out there.

Based on what she said, the two secrets of marketing and selling are persistence and clarity. You have to be persistent and keep trying to reach people, keep telling your family, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and whoever else about what you do and why you are good at it, and keep in touch with the customers you do have and be available for them. You also have to be clear about what you do and you should spend time thinking about exactly what you are good at (as has come up in other posts, specialization can make you stand out from other translators and can add to your credibility). You should also be able to explain to customers what you can do for them and why they should work with you. Remember that people are easily overwhelmed by information, so being succinct and clear about your services is very beneficial.

Selling your services and negotiating prices are two related areas that are often difficult for translators, and Ms. Thordén also gave some advice on negotiation. Few translators, or other freelancers, want to argue with customers about price. We want to be friendly and liked by our customers, so when they complain about the cost, many of us get nervous or scared and try to appease them by hurriedly offering discounts or agreeing to lower the price. Ms. Thordén doesn’t agree with this approach.

Customers always think translators are too expensive (part of this may be because they don’t understand what translation really is or why it is necessary, so they don’t like paying for it, and also, of course, it is natural that companies want to keep their costs down). When faced with this situation, a translator should be clear and simply explain why his services are valuable. If clients complain, take control of the conversation. Either sit there quietly while the customer talks, which admittedly is quite difficult to do, or else say something such as, “I hear that you are hesitant. Why?” Respond calmly and clearly to whatever concerns the customer brings up, again explaining what you can do for him and his company, If the customer still doesn’t want to pay, say, “It’s too bad you can’t afford me.” Don’t lower your price just because others are good at negotiating or complaining; you should only lower the cost if it is strategically important for you to do so. Make sure you have decided in advance how much you are worth and what the absolute lowest price you will take for the project is.

And, finally, though it may sound obvious, when the assignment is finished, thank the customer. Say, “Thank you for choosing me” or “Thank you for working with me.” Being polite never hurts and it usually helps!

In other words, be clear about what you do and why you are good at it, and be able to explain this to others firmly and politely.

Cost and Effectiveness

Two of the lectures at the conference that I enjoyed the most might be considered basic, but they offered advice that I think is useful for both new and more experienced translators.

Björn Olofsson started his seminar with the premise that there are translation jobs available, but the question is how customers can find the translators they need. Mr. Olofsson said that when trying to reach customers, translators should think about cost and effectiveness. For example, having an ad in the yellow pages is expensive and generally doesn’t help that much, while being a member of a translators’ association is one of the best tools available to translators. Membership is relatively expensive, but also quite effective, since most associations have databases where customers can find you and the association also serves as a credential for translators.

Having your own website is generally pretty cheap and is a good way to sell your services. Here, though, it is important that the first page of your site clearly shows what you do, what you offer, and what you are good at. Customers don’t have the time to go searching for this information. Mr. Olofsson also thinks your website should primarily be in the source language and since generally the source language is not a translator’s mother tongue, make sure you get someone to edit and review the text. Language is your job, after all, and if you have any grammar or spelling mistakes on your website, customers will not trust your language skills and will not hire you. Mr. Olofsson’s website is only in Swedish, but it exemplifies a clear site with easy-to-find information.

Mr. Olofsson also mentioned the importance of specialization, an issue that came up several times during the conference. Many people can translate general texts, so specializing, whether in financial reports, contracts, users’ manuals, medical documents, or whatever else, is a way to help you stand out among all the translators. It also helps customers find you and I believe it builds trust as well; someone who claims to be good at everything is not so believable, but someone who says that she works primarily with dental texts and turns down legal documents because she doesn’t think she provide a high enough level of quality and service is someone companies would be more likely to hire. If you specialize and are asked to take on a translation outside your field, provide service to your customers by finding someone else to do the job or recommending a translators’ association and its database.

In other words, Mr. Olofsson's tips are to think about cost versus effectiveness when marketing your services, have a good website, and specialize.

For more on selling your services, which was the subject of the other lecture I mentioned above, see the next post.

Back from the Conference

Well, I’ve returned from the SFÖ conference in Stenungssund now. I enjoyed the lectures and got to meet many people, and since my goals for such an event are making contacts and learning new things, I can say the conference was a success. There were seminars on everything from EU documents to insurance, from searching on the Internet to copyright, and lectures ranging from how to better sell your services to social skills, and from drug slang to workplace ergonomics. In the next posts, I’ll write specifically about some of the lectures, but in the meantime, here are some photographs from Stenungssund.

Off to the Conference

I’m off to the annual conference of the Sveriges Facköversättarförening/Swedish Association of Professional Translators. I’ll be sure to report on the conference when I get back!

Archive by Category

I've organized all my past posts by category now, so it should be easy to find information on whatever translation-related topic you are interested in. The current categories are: translation and translators (these posts are explorations of what translation is and what it means to be a translator), practical advice (how to find jobs, for example), education (how to become a translator and what sort of education is needed), literary, poetry, interviews (currently there's only an interview with me, but more interviews will be coming soon), articles, book reviews and other posts on books, and polls. You can find the organized archive on the left side of the page, below the links.

Links for the Four Steps

In the last post, I detailed four steps to take in order to find more translating jobs. Now I’ll list some links you may find helpful. This is far from a complete list, however, so make sure you do more research on your own.

A very good general resource is A Translator’s Home Companion. This site has comprehensive listings, including of agencies and other places to find jobs.

Another good resource is translator Cecilia Falk’s page.

1. Sign up for e-lists.

Jobs for Freelance Translators

Translation and Interpretation Jobs

LANTRA

Literary Translation

2. Join a professional organization, preferably a translators’ society.

American Translators Association

International Federation of Translators

American Literary Translators Association

The Translators and Interpreters Guild

Institute of Translation and Interpreting

Sveriges Facköversättarförening/Swedish Association of Professional Translators

Föreningen Auktoriserade Translatorer/Federation of Authorized Translators

3. Register with translation agencies.

There are too many agencies to list here, but the following link and the two links I mentioned first have their own lists, plus you can do an easy internet search by entering your languages and the words “translation agency.”

Translators Café

4. Talk.

I can’t help you with links here! But I can remind you to tell people that you are a translator and I suggest you add a signature with that information to all your outgoing e-mails.

If you find any other good links, let me know!

Four First Steps

Some new translators have contacted me and asked me for advice on finding translation jobs. There are, of course, many ways of going about this, but here are a few simple first steps translators might want to take. All four suggestions focus on making contacts, which is an essential part of any business.

1. Sign up for e-lists.

This is the simplest step to take and is a good way to begin. There are many free mailing lists on translation; some require that you be a member of a translators’ association, but others accept anyone interested in translation. E-lists are good places to meet other translators and find jobs.

On such lists, people ask for and offer advice, talk about career options, mention which agencies don’t pay on time, discuss invoicing, ask specific questions about terminology, and so forth. Also, people sometimes realize they've accepted more work than they can actually finish on time, so they offer sub-contracted assignments, and that is a good way to get some experience. I have found that many people get work from other translators, especially in the beginning, so clearly, getting to know other translators is important for many reasons.

Thus, I suggest you join some list serves related to your languages. If you introduce yourself as being a new translator, I am certain people will offer advice, help, encouragement, and maybe even assignments. Experienced translators also find such lists helpful. Even if you've worked as a translator for many years, you might still have questions or need support.

2. Join a professional organization, preferably a translators’ society.

While there are some translator programs and translator certifications, the majority of freelance translators work without having studied to become translators and without having received an official certification. Partly because of this, customers don’t always know how to find a translator they can really rely on. The major translators’ associations are professional groups with entry requirements and standards that they uphold. Customers, therefore, might prefer to hire translators who are members of such groups, and they also use association databases to find translators who have the background they are looking for. Thus, being a member could very well bring you more work. I have certainly found that being a member of Sveriges Facköversättarförening/Swedish Association of Professional Translators (SFÖ) has helped customers find me and that the credential is viewed positively.

Such associations also provide translators with a large network, just as the e-lists do. Through SFÖ and its e-mail list, I have met other translators who sometimes had too much work and then passed on assignments to me, as well as translators who have been able to answer specific terminology questions I’ve had. Just this week, a translator who has different specialty areas than I do spent some time answering a few questions I had on a translation that was more in her field than in fields I typically work with. I hope that I’ll be able to help her in turn at some point. In general, the people in the group willingly share their experience and knowledge and since freelancers often work alone, having a network of people who can help you when needed is definitely appreciated.

Many associations have interesting magazines, gatherings, and annual conferences as well, all of which help you make contacts and develop professionally. In fact, I’m looking forward to attending SFÖ’s conference in just a few days.

One problem beginning translators have is that professional organizations often expect you to have references when you apply to join. If you’re just starting out, you probably haven’t had enough customers yet to be able to meet the reference requirement. That’s why I suggest joining e-lists first, as I think you’ll be able to find a few assignments that way, especially by sub-contracting from other translators. Another complaint people have about professional organizations is that the membership fees are often high. I know I resisted joining SFÖ for awhile for just this reason, but I have earned back my annual fee many times from the work I’ve gotten through the group. Sometimes you have to spend money in order to earn money!

3. Register with translation agencies.

Finding direct clients can be difficult, so many people start off translating for agencies, and plenty of translators continue to work primarily with agencies even when they are more settled in their career.

A quick search on the internet will help you find agencies that work with your language pairs and then you can fill out the form many of them have on their websites. However, some agencies only want certified translators, or translators who use specific computer translation programs, or translators who work with particular subjects, so make sure you study their websites carefully before filling in the form.

Also, most of the agencies will want you to name your price right away, so you might want to think carefully about how much you'll charge. Remember when mentioning a figure that the bottom line is often the deciding factor when agencies pick which translators to hire and also keep in mind that agencies generally pay less than direct customers.

4. Talk.

Tell anyone and everyone that you work as a translator, and keep active so you meet many people. You never know who might need your services, or who might mention to someone else who happens to need a translator that you work as one. You might be surprised by how many people start sending you job announcements or ads from newspapers or websites or whatever else, or who pass on information about you to potential customers. Among other things, friends have noticed ads looking for translators and sent those ads on to me; I have gotten work thanks to the sharp eyes of these friends.

Besides translation, I also teach English, write articles, and copy edit, so I meet people in other fields. Some of my adult students work at companies where they need to translate their website or invoices to English, and schools where I teach sometimes need to translate evaluations or letters, and I meet people through my work as a freelance journalist and find they want someone to translate their restaurant's menus, and so forth. For me, having several jobs, meeting many people, and telling friends and relatives about my work helps me find a lot of opportunities.

Of course, it’s especially helpful if you live in a country where the language you want to translate from is spoken. Since I live in Sweden and translate from Swedish, I meet people frequently who need help translating from Swedish. But translation is a job that you can do from any location, so you don’t have to move somewhere just to get work! Instead, join lists and professional organizations, sign up with agencies, and let people know that you are a translator. Those are good steps to take no matter what stage you are at in your career.