Competent translators show the following attributes:
- a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, from which they are translating (the source language);
- an excellent command of the language into which they are translating (the target language);
- familiarity with the subject matter of the text being translated;
- a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages, including sociolinguistic register when appropriate; and
- a finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase (“translate literally”) and when to paraphrase, so as to assure true rather than spurious equivalents between the source and target language texts.[59]
Learn Portuguese, History and brazilian Culture in Ashburn!
A competent translator is not only bilingual but bicultural. A language is not merely a collection of words and of rules of grammar and syntax for generating sentences, but also a vast interconnecting system of connotations and cultural references whose mastery, writes linguist Mario Pei, “comes close to being a lifetime job.”[60] The complexity of the translator’s task cannot be overstated; one author suggests that becoming an accomplished translator—after having already acquired a good basic knowledge of both languages and cultures—may require a minimum of ten years’ experience. Viewed in this light, it is a serious misconception to assume that a person who has fair fluency in two languages will, by virtue of that fact alone, be consistently competent to translate between them.[18] Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania and herself a translator, writes: “[I]t is [hard] to produce a good literary translation. This is certainly true of translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts, but it is also true of literary translation in general: it is very difficult. Most readers of foreign languages are not translators; most writers are not translators. Translators have to read and write at the same time, as if always playing multiple instruments in a one-person band. And most one-person bands do not sound very good.”[61]
Learn French in Ashburn!
Buy this E-Book
The translator’s role, in relation to the original text, has been compared to the roles of other interpretive artists, e.g., a musician or actor who interprets a work of musical or dramatic art. Translating, especially a text of any complexity (like other human activities[62]), involves interpretation: choices must be made, which implies interpretation.[15][e][f] Mark Polizzotti writes: “A good translation offers not a reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-representation, just as the performance of a play or a sonata is a representation of the script or the score, one among many possible representations.”[64] A translation of a text of any complexity is – as, itself, a work of art – unique and unrepeatable.[g]
The English-language novelist Joseph Conrad, whose writings Zdzisław Najder has described as verging on “auto-translation” from Conrad’s Polish and French linguistic personae,[65] advised his niece and Polish translator Aniela Zagórska: “[D]on’t trouble to be too scrupulous … I may tell you (in French) that in my opinion il vaut mieux interpréter que traduire [it is better to interpret than to translate] …Il s’agit donc de trouver les équivalents. Et là, ma chère, je vous prie laissez vous guider plutôt par votre tempérament que par une conscience sévère … [It is, then, a question of finding the equivalent expressions. And there, my dear, I beg you to let yourself be guided more by your temperament than by a strict conscience….]”[66] Conrad advised another translator that the prime requisite for a good translation is that it be “idiomatic”. “For in the idiom is the clearness of a language and the language’s force and its picturesqueness—by which last I mean the picture-producing power of arranged words.”[67] Conrad thought C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s English translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time—or, in Scott Moncrieff’s rendering, Remembrance of Things Past) to be preferable to the French original.[68][h]
Emily Wilson writes that “translation always involves interpretation, and [requires] every translator… to think as deeply as humanly possible about each verbal, poetic, and interpretative choice.”[69] Translation of other than the simplest brief texts requires painstakingly close reading of the source text and the draft translation, so as to resolve the ambiguities inherent in language and thereby to asymptotically approach the most accurate rendering of the source text.[70]
Part of the ambiguity, for a translator, involves the structure of human language. Psychologist and neural scientist Gary Marcus notes that “virtually every sentence [that people generate] is ambiguous, often in multiple ways. Our brain is so good at comprehending language that we do not usually notice.”[71] An example of linguistic ambiguity is the “pronoun disambiguation problem” (“PDP”): a machine has no way of determining to whom or what a pronoun in a sentence—such as “he”, “she” or “it”—refers.[72] Such disambiguation is not infallible by a human, either.
Ambiguity is a concern both to translators and – as the writings of poet and literary critic William Empson have demonstrated – to literary critics. Ambiguity may be desirable, indeed essential, in poetry and diplomacy; it can be more problematic in ordinary prose.[73]
Christopher Kasparek also cautions that competent translation – analogously to the dictum, in mathematics, of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems – generally requires more information about the subject matter than is present in the actual source text. Therefore translation of a text of any complexity typically requires some research on the translator’s part.[70]
A translator faces two contradictory tasks: when translating, to strive for omniscience concerning the text; and, when reviewing the resulting translation, to adopt the reader’s unfamiliarity with it. Analogously, “[i]n the process, the translator is also constantly seesawing between the respective linguistic and cultural features of his two languages.”[70]
Thus, writes Kasparek, “Translating a text of any complexity, like the performing of a musical or dramatic work, involves interpretation: choices must be made, which entails interpretation. Bernard Shaw, aspiring to felicitous understanding of literary works, wrote in the preface to his 1901 volume, Three Plays for Puritans: ‘I would give half a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.'”[70]
It is due to the inescapable necessity of interpretation that – pace the story about the 3rd century BCE Septuagint translations of some biblical Old Testament books from Hebrew into Koine Greek – no two translations of a literary work, by different hands or by the same hand at different times, are likely to be identical. As has been observed – by Leonardo da Vinci? Paul Valery? E.M. Forster? Pablo Picasso? by all of them? – “A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.”[70]
Translators may render only parts of the original text, provided that they inform readers of that action. But a translator should not assume the role of censor and surreptitiously delete or bowdlerize passages merely to please a political or moral interest.[74]
Translating has served as a school of writing for many an author, much as the copying of masterworks of painting has schooled many a novice painter.[75] A translator who can competently render an author’s thoughts into the translator’s own language, should certainly be able to adequately render, in his own language, any thoughts of his own. Translating (like analytic philosophy) compels precise analysis of language elements and of their usage. In 1946 the poet Ezra Pound, then at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Washington, D.C., advised a visitor, the 18-year-old beginning poet W.S. Merwin: “The work of translation is the best teacher you’ll ever have.”[76][i] Merwin, translator-poet who took Pound’s advice to heart, writes of translation as an “impossible, unfinishable” art.[78]
Translators, including monks who spread Buddhist texts in East Asia, and the early modern European translators of the Bible, in the course of their work have shaped the very languages into which they have translated. They have acted as bridges for conveying knowledge between cultures; and along with ideas, they have imported from the source languages, into their own languages, loanwords and calques of grammatical structures, idioms, and vocabulary.
Hey you, Tourist in the city of Ashburn; Learn basic greetings – Buy Here!
