Speaking of Cheapness…

I don’t usually write about interpretation, but this article relates to my last post, about publishers not being willing to spend the money for quality work.

For those who can’t read Swedish, I can summarize the article as follows: Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi gave a speech at the Göteborg book fair last month. She speaks Farsi, so an interpreter was needed to translate her words to Swedish. Time and money were not spent on finding a proper interpreter for her, so someone who speaks Dari and Pashto was hired instead. This interpreter could not manage the Farsi, and apparently made something of a mess of the speech. She was finally replaced by another interpreter. However, this one was Norwegian. So the people in the audience then had to try to understand the Norwegian, when they ought to have had a good Farsi-Swedish interpreter from the beginning.

Clearly, this kind of thing should not happen at all, but the fact that it happened to a Nobel Prize laureate at a major literary event speaks volumes, to use an apt phrase, about how people don’t recognize the importance of interpretation and translation and aren’t educated enough about what is required in order to do the job well. The book fair organizers probably waited until the last minute to even think about finding an interpreter and then didn’t realize that there are a variety of Middle Eastern languages and that an interpreter of Dari may be able to understand Farsi competently but is not qualified enough to interpret between it and Swedish.

So we translators and interpreters need to find more ways of educating our customers. Any ideas?

One More Post on Pamuk and Translation

To continue briefly with discussing Orhan Pamuk and translation, I’d like to point you to this article, entitled Found in Translation (thank you, Erika Dreifus, for sending it on!).

The article is interesting on its own since it interviews both translators and authors about the translation of literature, but it is especially relevant as it touches on why the English translations of Pamuk’s work are so important, as discussed in my last post:

While his work has been translated into more than 40 languages, Pamuk pays special attention to the English translations. "Many times, I have learned that a foreign translation did not come from my native language but from the English version. This can be a problem, so it is very important that I have a good relationship with my English translator."

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t delve further into this (and it would have probably been beyond the piece’s scope, anyway), but, as already mentioned, I do think it is disappointing that publishing companies rely on relay translations. This is probably because of the high cost and difficulty of finding experienced translators with the right language combinations, so the solutions seem to me to be to encourage students to learn more languages from an early age (and for schools to not just focus on the ‘big’ languages) and for publishers to realize the importance of a good translation and the need to spend money on it.

Translation and the Nobel Prize

I am not sure how many, if indeed any at all, members of the Swedish Academy can read Turkish. I doubt that all the members know Turkish, which suggests that when the Academy chose Orhan Pamuk as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, some of the members had read his works in translation, presumably Swedish translation. Clearly, this must influence how they experienced his fiction.

What’s more, I recently heard that the Swedish publishers of Mr. Pamuk’s books offered such a small fee to potential Turkish to Swedish literary translators that they were forced instead to rely on English to Swedish translators. In other words, the Swedish publications are most likely translations of translations (Turkish to English to Swedish).

I am not criticizing the Academy’s choice of Mr. Pamuk, but simply pointing out that the publishing world and their concern for the bottom line is apparently such that the work of major authors has to be translated via relay translation, which naturally distances it even more from the original. We know how much can be lost in translation as it is, so translating over two or more languages seems even more difficult and risky.

I also wonder how these facts – that Mr. Pamuk’s novels were probably not read in the original by all the Academy members, that some of his works were probably translated from English to Swedish rather than directly from Turkish (and this may be true of other languages as well) – affect the Swedish Academy’s annual decision. Surely the esteemed members of the Academy can read languages other than Swedish and English, but they can’t together cover all the world’s languages and literatures, so they have to use translations. That’s understandable, but I think that at the very least, the publishing world, and the Swedish Academy, should try to avoid relay translations. It may be more expensive for the publishers, but the results will surely be worthwhile.

And The Winner Is…

This year’s Nobel Prize in literature went to Orhan Pamuk.

What do you think of that?

Nobel Prize, I.B. Singer, and Yiddish

Thinking about the Nobel Prize in literature and about the “Last Words” article mentioned recently, I recalled Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel speech of 1978. Singer wrote in what was considered a dying language – that is, Yiddish – and in his speech he referred to what is important and special about his language.

Among other things, he said: “Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists – rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.”

Yiddish – along with many other languages – has not yet said its last words. As I said in my post about the “Last Words” article, we simply shouldn’t let that happen.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in literature will be announced in the next week, and it will be exciting to see who receives it. In Sweden, the general feeling towards the literature prize seems to be that the winner is usually someone who isn’t so well known and that the Swedish Academy tries to make some sort of statement with their choice each year. For example, for the past couple of years, many people have thought than an Arab author would be chosen, with the Syrian poet Adonis mentioned frequently as a strong candidate. Whether all that’s true or not, I know I personally find the announcements and ceremonies fun to watch, and I enjoy reading and seeing interviews with current and past winners in all the categories.

For translators, the literature prize is especially interesting. The winner of the literature prize naturally gets a lot of publicity and a larger audience, and this almost always requires translations of his or her work. If the author writes in a less common language or has a very distinct style, publishing companies have to scramble to find translators as soon as the announcement is made.

So are there any guesses about who will win this year?

Against Last Words

In the most recent New York Times magazine, Walter Benn Michaels published an article entitled “Last Words.” In it, he writes that it doesn’t matter if languages die out. One language is as good as another, he thinks, so people can simply switch over to another language. As a translator and someone interested in languages, however, I have to disagree.

As we well know, there exist no two languages with an exact one-to-one equivalence. If there did, translators wouldn’t be needed. People could simply look up each word in a bilingual dictionary and translate it directly. That’s how easy it would be to communicate with people from other languages and cultures. And if all languages had the same view of the world and of life – and this would likely have to be the case if we all had the same ideas and concepts but just used different terms for them – there probably would be one world culture.

But that is not the case. Each language that exists offers a unique way of experiencing life; each culture expresses its outlook and its beliefs through the way it creates and uses its tongue. At some point, most translators have surely come across an “untranslatable” word or concept, which means something so culture-specific that it is hard to find a translation for it. The Swedish word “lagom” is often given as an example. One could argue that “lagom,” which means something like “not too much, not too little, but just right,” reveals something about the Swedish character, and explains, among other things, why Sweden has prided itself on being a neutral country. If Swedish no longer existed, according to Michaels’ view, Swedes and their descendants could just find a new language to use, and that would be just as good a way for them to express themselves. While it is true that Swedish is no better and no worse than any other language, think what would be lost if Swedish was not used any more. Without the word “lagom,” and all other Swedish words, the uniquely Swedish way of seeing the world would disappear.

Obviously, this loss would not just affect Swedes (or the speakers of whichever tongue was no longer used). The diversity of languages that exists in our world is beneficial for us all, because we can learn from other peoples and they way they live and experience the world. Rather than not caring when a language dies, we should work to learn and preserve languages. Let’s not allow any more languages to speak their “last words.”

Educating the Customer

In the most recent issue of the Translation Journal, I have an article entitled ‘Educating the Customer.’ I’ve posted it below, but there are other interesting articles to read in the Translation Journal, so check it out. And let me know if you have any other ideas on how to educate customers!

Educating the Customer

“$35 to translate that? I heard there are computer programs that can do the same thing,” a potential customer complained to me once. It wasn’t the first time someone had said something along those lines. “My colleague was very pleased with your work,” another person told me, “but I found someone who could do it much cheaper.” While many customers don’t seem to know much about the translation process, a surprising number of them do seem to have pretty firm ideas about who can translate and how much it should cost.

I’ll never forget the Friday night when a customer e-mailed me a bunch of documents at 10 p.m. with instructions to have everything translated by Monday morning. He had not asked me if I was available to translate that weekend, if I was proficient in the field the documents covered, or even how much it would cost. I wrote him back within the hour (yes, I was actually working then anyway!) to tell him that because his assignment was a weekend rush job it would cost more than usual, and he sent me an angry response in the middle of the night. “I suspect that you and I have vastly different ideas about working together,” he wrote. “There is no way I am paying that amount.”

In May, at the annual conference for the Swedish Association of Professional Translators, translator David Rumsey gave a lecture about the United States translation market. Something he mentioned was that one reason why the American market is large but underdeveloped is because there are pervasive myths there about what exactly translation involves. Mr. Rumsey mentioned that many Americans believe that translation is simply “typing in a foreign language,” and others think anyone can do it (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. Mr. Rumsey may consider these false beliefs American, but the fact is that they are not unique to the United States. Many translators I’ve spoken to, whether from Sweden, England, the United States, or elsewhere, have shared tales about customers who claimed they’d go find “some student” or “ask the foreign neighbor for help” rather than pay a professional translator to do the job correctly.

If so many translators have stories like these, the question then becomes how to educate customers about what translation really is and why it is worthwhile to pay for professional services. To start off, translators can include detailed information about their background, their work methods, and their opinions about translation in any marketing material they use, including their websites. This sounds obvious, but there are people who think that their job title means enough on its own, or that since translation is necessary and important, it can sell itself. While some customers may simply skim over whatever you write and instead just request an estimate, many are curious and will read the text. If you have been to law school and specialize in legal texts, for example, or if you have translated a dozen novels, or if you have attended programs in translation, or if you worked as an engineer for 15 years before becoming a translator of technical manuals, announce those facts and describe what they mean for you as a translator; potential clients will be impressed and will know that you clearly are qualified for the job and will expect to be paid accordingly. You can also write about why translation is important and how your services will help the customers. If you translate grades for students who want to apply to study abroad, point out that you are certified, or if you work primarily for corporate clients, tell them that if they expect to sell products to customers in other countries, it is essential that the language on their website or in their users’ manuals is correct. Give examples of poor mistranslations that they should want to avoid, and remind them that without good translation, their customers won’t trust in the quality of their products or services. By the way, take that advice yourself, too, and make sure your own website is flawless; if necessary, hire a copy editor to review any foreign language pages you have written.

Another step we translators can take is to turn down any assignments that are outside our fields of expertise. It is tempting to want to accept all jobs and to want to convince customers that we are excellent all-around translators, but honestly telling people that you work only on medical documents and never on poems, or that you are comfortable with genealogy but not with contracts, makes them more aware that each translation is a specific text with its own requirements and that special skills and knowledge are needed. Just as a heart surgeon wouldn’t think of treating a patient’s allergies and a professor of Victorian literature wouldn’t dare teach a physics course, neither should translators attempt work on subjects that are far out of their own fields. That doesn’t mean, of course, that translators can’t learn about new areas and add new specializations, but it is not professional to endeavor to do that in just a couple of days and if you don’t do a good job, you will not only have lost a customer, but also anyone he would have recommended you to. If you turn down an assignment, try to recommend an appropriate colleague for it. Both your colleague and your customer will appreciate it; the former may in turn offer you jobs in your field, and the latter will remember the extra service you provided and may return to you with other assignments in the future.

Something I try to do whenever I receive a shocked response to an estimate is to write a polite e-mail in which I explain what is involved in translation and how I arrived at the price. If a lot of research is required in order to find specific technical words or if the assignment requires you to work nights or over a weekend, tell the customer. If you are expected to complete a large job in a short period of time or if you will have to go to a university library to use reference books that are only found there, explain that. Don’t be shy about saying how many hours you anticipate a translation to take you or about describing what the work will demand of you; most people don’t understand what goes into a translation and they may, as Mr. Rumsey said, view it as merely “typing in a foreign language.” I have more than once told customers how long their documents would take me to translate, how much tax I would pay, what amount would be left over, and how much that equaled per hour of work. Some people were definitely surprised at the minimum wage the fee they offered me turned out to be, and they understood that the prices I named weren’t just randomly chosen but that they had been carefully considered. Others were interested to learn that a translator didn’t just sit down at a computer and look up words in a dictionary for a few minutes and then the assignment was finished. It is unfortunately easy to take a job for granted when you don’t know what it really involves.

In his lecture, Mr. Rumsey offered some other ideas. He suggested that translators should provide information about different languages and cultures, which would presumably help those who believe that the world is monolingual, and reduce the risks for customers. By reducing the risks, he meant that translators and translation agencies should be prepared to provide free consulting and editing, have third-party reviewers, and other such things. I personally am not sure that offering cheaper prices or free services is the best method, as people are often reluctant to start paying for something they initially received for free or for a reduced cost, and there is a strange phenomenon in which people don’t always value what they don’t pay for. But I know that some translators like to draw in customers with low prices and then convince them to remain customers, even as the prices are increased, by doing good work.

The more customers know about what translation means and what qualifies a translator to take on a given assignment, the more they understand why they ought to pay for high quality work. It’s true that some people will always want to take the cheap route, regardless of what that means for their documents, but others will realize that doing something right usually means paying for it. So make the choice easy for your customers by giving them as much information as you can about your background and experience, about what translation entails, and about your pricing system. A customer who really cares about his documents and who has been educated about translation is less likely to waste your time by arguing that his friend or a computer program could do the job just as well and for half the cost. An educated customer is more likely to choose you and your services, and to gladly pay for a job well done.

Back Online

Well, I’m now safely ensconced in my new home in southern Wales. I’ve moved here to study in a translation studies program at Swansea University, and I am sure I will read lots of interesting books about translation so I can gain new ideas that I can then share with you.

My new university has a nice collection of translation links that might be of use to you.

The Secret Weapon

Here is my essay from the Bryn Mawr College Cookbook. It’s about how food can be used in language education, so it might be some food for thought for those of you learning a new language.

The Secret Weapon

During my years teaching English in Sweden, I’ve frequently come back to food as a topic of conversation in class. I don’t do this just because I happen to be very interested in food. Many students don’t want to talk about politics or religion, because of an understandable desire to avoid conflict, and only some are interested in sports, movies, or books. But everyone has an opinion on food, and no one is afraid to try out their English, no matter how tentative, when the subject is as basic, and as essential, as food.

Beginning students tend to prefer to simply repeat the English words for various foods, tasting the words in their mouths. Intermediate students like to talk about what they ate for breakfast that day or what they usually eat on certain holidays, or they enjoy announcing which foods they like or dislike and why. The most advanced students discuss food memories, and they laugh at mistranslations or other silly mistakes, such as the misspelling of “pea soup” not uncommonly seen on English menus in Sweden, or the student who insisted he liked to drink “bear,” or the woman who advised that crying babies should be fed “glue.” She meant “gruel,” although that’s not necessarily so much better.

But whatever their level, all of my students are very curious to learn about food in the United States, and to compare it to food in Sweden, Poland, Lebanon, Russia, Denmark, France, Japan, or wherever they originally come from. And learning about the eating habits of Americans seems to teach by extension. A student might ask about typical American Easter foods, but then the class wonders whether all Americans celebrate Easter, and what other religions exist in the United States, and how the different races and religions get along, and suddenly we’re talking about issues much bigger than what Americans generally eat for a yearly holiday meal. Starting with that most everyday of subjects – food – helps the students gain a deeper understanding of a country and a culture that seems very far away to them.

A little physical reinforcement of all this new knowledge doesn’t hurt, so I gladly bake for my students, bringing in American treats. For example, they have enjoyed fudge, oatmeal raisin cookies, chocolate chip cookies, muffins, and brownies. I make them guess at the ingredients and tell me the names in English: “Oatmeal in a cookie? Strange, but it’s really good!”

More than once, though, the dinner tables have been turned. Students eagerly tell me about their national dishes or favorite foods, and they teach the class the correct pronunciation, and bring in recipes, pictures, or even samples. I’ve been offered, among other items, ice chocolates, traditional Swedish curd cake, freshly baked scones with jam, spiced wine, gingerbread, and “lussekatter,” the Swedish buns made with saffron.

I’ve almost come to think of food as a secret weapon not only for language education, but also for inter-cultural understanding. It’s long been known that breaking bread together has a symbolic meaning, but I didn’t quite expect that just discussing bread could have such significant benefits as well. Using food as a subject and a starting-off point, my students enthusiastically practice their English while simultaneously attempting to learn more about what people and cultures outside their own country are like.

Seeing how food makes them more curious and more open has made me realize that the time has come for more people to literally talk turkey.

Moving & Bryn Mawr College Cookbook

I won’t be posting for about two weeks, because I will be in the process of moving to another country and will be computer-less. I’m not sure how I’ll manage without my computer – many of us translators and writers use a computer every day. But I’ll look forward to posting again from my new location.

In the meantime, I’d like to announce that the Bryn Mawr College Cookbook has just been published. I organized and edited this cookbook, the proceeds for which will go to my beloved alma mater, Bryn Mawr College.

This book contains nearly 90 recipes for appetizers, salads, soups, side dishes, spices, main courses, desserts, and drinks, ranging from Korean dumplings, blintzes, chicken and yam chowder, fudge cake, and cassoulet to bolognese sauce, cranberry jelly, curry, bourbon balls, and Mayan hot chocolate. There are also 13 essays on food-related topics such as dining at Bryn Mawr, the joys and bonds of teatime, and discovering the perfect berries. Over 60 illustrations and photographs are included as well, most of them of the college. The alumnae featured in this cookbook come from the class of ’28 (with a recipe from actress Katharine Hepburn) through the class of ’06, with stops in almost every decade in between.

If this interests you at all, please check out the book.

The next post will contain a short essay I have in the cookbook, since it relates to the subject of the past few posts – learning a new language. After that post, the next time I write will be from Wales!

Websites for Learning Languages

The past two posts gave general advice for learning languages. Here are some websites that could help you do that; these are just a few of the many useful websites out there, and I have focused primarily on English and the Scandinavian languages here. Don’t forget to look at the references linked to on this blog as well. Also, of course, there are lots of great self-study books for languages available. For example, my favorite book for learning English grammar is “English Grammar in Use” by Raymond Murphy; I’ve used it with dozens of students and I recommend it to those of you want to improve your grammar skills.

Here are some sites for languages in general:

The Foreign Service Institute offers free self-study courses for French, Vietnamese, Turkish, and other languages. I tried some of the Chinese course and am eager to do more.

Land of Links has lots of links about various languages

Here are some reference sites for Scandinavian languages:

Scandinavian Dictionary

New Cross-Nordic Dictionary

Some sites for Swedish:

Swedish Lessons

Swedish-English Dictionary

Danish:

Danish Grammar and Vocabulary

Norwegian:

Norwegian Learning Links

Icelandic:

Icelandic Grammar

All sorts of links about Iceland and Icelandic

Finnish:

English-Finnish Vocabulary Quizzes

Finnish-English Dictionary

Yiddish:

Der Bay

Shtetl

English:

Common Errors in English

English Page

Tower of English

English Etymology

Feel free to let me know about other interesting and useful language links!

More Tips for Learning a Language

The last post looked primarily at passive language learning skills such as reading and listening. They are important skills, but the more active skills of writing and speaking are also essential to practice, though that is harder to do, especially if you don’t live in a country where people speak the language you are learning.

In terms of writing, it is not much fun to fill in lots of worksheets, even if that is a good method if you have a self-study textbook with an answer key. More enjoyable and useful would be to use that time-tested technique of having a pen-pal who is a native speaker, especially if that pen-pal is willing to correct your mistakes. These days, you can use regular mail, e-mail, or instant messenger to write to your pen-pal. It is also possible to find language groups online, to take online courses that focus on writing, or to find a private tutor willing to work with you via mail or e-mail. Students have certainly sent me many e-mails and asked me to correct their texts. It’s an easy and helpful way to get better at writing.

As already mentioned, the best thing would be to live in or visit a country where people speak the language, so you can practice and get more confident about your speaking skills. Failing that, you can adapt the pen-pal method mentioned above and have a native speaker with whom you get together regularly or with whom you exchange conversational tapes or cds. You can also use a service such as Skype to chat. If you want to work on your pronunciation alone, record people (whether on tv, radio, or in person) talking in the language you want to learn, and then record yourself saying the same words and phrases. Compare your pronunciation and accent to the native speakers’ and keep working at it until you feel more comfortable and sound more natural.

The next post will look at some websites that could help you as you learn a new language.

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.