Translation I

Simplistically, translation is converting one written language into another, and interpretation is converting the spoken word into another (spoken) tongue. Transliteration is really a word-by-word conversion.

A translation ideally reads as if it was the original, but getting the niceties of language and the idioms across isn’t as easy as you might think. It’s straightforward to get the meaning more or less right — we have all seen examples of DIY instructions where the meaning is apparent, even if a bit mangled.

I’ve done some translations from German to English; these were scientific, medical academic papers. This is usually simple enough, provided you know the conventions in the two languages. In other words, you need to be familiar with how such a paper appears in German and how it would appear in English. Such papers usually follow the IMRAD standard — introduction, methods, results and discussion. It’s only the discussion which can be troublesome at times, as it’s opinions and meanings that you are trying to get across.

I sometimes got the papers in German, sometimes as a first draft in English. The papers in English were interesting; there were times when I had to translate back into German to get an idea of what the authors were trying to say, before I could put down what I thought they were really trying to say.

I was asked at times how I would put a German phrase into English, just a phrase in a sentence. I often couldn’t — it wasn’t that I didn’t understand it, it was because the structure of the sentence wasn’t what would be expected in English, the translated phrase simply did not fit in.

In these papers and articles, there are standard forms of expression in both languages. Thus, Darstellung der Gallenblase in German becomes The gallbladder was exposed in English — a literal translation would be exposure [or exposing] [of] the gallbladder. Now, this latter is quite understandable, but it is not how it would be written in English. This is something that the translator just has to know — it’s not enough to know what the words and phrases mean, they have to be rendered into the equivalent words and phrases in English. And the only way that this can be done is through knowledge of the phraseology of both languages as used in the specific academic articles.

After a few goes with translating the academic papers, my solution was simple; I would more or less completely rewrite them. I made sure that all the facts were there, but I would re-arrange the order of things, convert long sentences into two, re-paragraph. In short, I did whatever it took to make it look like an English ‘original’ and not a translation. But then, I did know what the authors were saying, I understood the background and the technical terms; I’d guess that non-specialised translation services would struggle with this.

You might say that it’s the meaning that’s important, the infelicities don’t really matter. Perhaps this is correct, but it’s so much easier to read something that is written fluently, where you just know what it means without having to struggle through it. And if it’s a struggle, you are more likely to give up, or, if you are the peer reviewer, to give up and suggest that it needs total revision. 

Human nature, really.