#translators problems

[nic0-r0bs]

Me, writing November in English first:

"How am I supposed to translate this joke into Italian?"

[awed-frog]

In today’s edition of ‘Boomer Did Whatever The Fuck They Wanted’, I just learned 90% of the Persian poetry quotes out there - especially Rumi and Hafez - are actually fake. Apparently this guy Daniel Ladinsky randomly started to ‘translate’ Persian poetry back in the 1970s despite not knowing a single word of Persian, and when he ran out of bad Victorian translations to plunder, he claimed Hafez appeared to him in a dream as a ‘fountain-shaped God of light’ and told him to write poetry under His name. So Ladinsky started to publish his own poems marketed as - and sold as, to this day - Rumi, Hafez and Sufi mysticism. 

Meanwhile I need written proof I took Chemistry in middle school when I’m applying for a waitressing job.

[z-to-s]

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

George Steiner

[awed-frog]

My employer all like: Sadly everything is online these days 😔, but we want to be different 💪!

Me waiting for the right moment to mention everything is online because we’re in the middle of a global pandemic:

[awed-frog]

Got it from a friend today I’m howling.

[awed-frog]

Imagine you’re a talented young poet (!) and your works are translated into a foreign language (!!) and you get to handpick your translator because you’re amazing like that (!!!) and you personally choose the person you think will best convey your words into their language (!!!!) and then that person resigns because an internet mob says they’re not the ‘right race’ for the job. 

Alternatively, imagine being a talented young writer (!) and all of a sudden another great writer chooses you personally (!!) to translate their work into your language (!!!) because they think you’re the best person to do that (!!!!) and then you’re forced to resign because an internet mob says you’re not the ‘right race’ for the job.

Like, in 2021.

[awed-frog]

I read this was a problem for many foreign Heads of State at the beginning of the Trump administration: translators and interpreters were so astonished & embarrassed by how Trump speaks, and they found it so difficult to convey properly, they generally translated him as they would a normal person (ie, adding grammar and stuff), so their country’s politicians assumed he was a normal person. But I don’t get how people can understand him in English and still think he’s some tragic figure playing 5D chess.

[awed-frog]

Hey, I've always ben curious, how do interpreters translate a language if the word order is not the same? Saw those graphs and decided to ask you! Thanks! I wish you a good day!

Hi there! Thank you for this question - this is something I used to wonder myself before intepreting school, and I have to say - knowing how this works doesn’t make it a lot easier to a) actually do it and b) understand how any brain could possibly do it? Because it’s hard enough to interpret between European language, which are sometimes a bit different in word order and general worldview, but those people who work with non-related languages and have to shift cultural perspectives on the spot - that takes some real talent. 

So - how do you deal with a difference in word order? Rule of the thumb is, ‘With care, with practice, and ideally with some good fucking luck’. 

There are some techniques you can use to reshape your sentence, and if you listen to a lot of intepreters, you might start to hear them. One method consists in starting your own sentence with a question: ‘What do we know about turtles? Well - turtles are so very cute...’ - when you hear something like this, it’s very likely the original language went something like ‘Turtles [gibberish] [gibberish] [gibberish] very cute’, and since the gibberish doesn’t translate to your own language, you’re forced to wait for the actual information. Or you can say, ‘When it comes to the subject of turtles...’ as a way of waiting for what comes after. In some cases, you can even switch out verbs: for instance, I work with German, and very often the key verb - and the element telling me whether the sentence is positive or negative - is at the end. What this means is that if the original sentence goes ‘The Commission’s vote determined turtles are indeed very cute’, I might have to offer something like ‘The Commission voted on the issue of turtles and their cuteness: the conclusion is, they are indeed very cute’. So, you see, I gained those two seconds in the beginning to avoid being blindsided by a final ‘cute they are NOT’, which would have derailed my entire sentence.

Of course, if the conversation or speech is not too quick, there’s nothing wrong with waiting and leaving a second of silence until you can hear the entire sentence. The only danger with that is that the more you wait, the more out of synch you are with the speaker, the more difficult to repeat everything they’re saying without leaving key details out.

So here is the general theory; it does take a lot of practice to handle these techniques in a way that makes sense. I only have experience with German myself - it must be a nightmare to do simultaneous interpreting from a language that’s even more different from your own.

(And as a final point: there’s word order and word order. Sometimes, you’re forced to put the words in a determined way so your sentence will make sense, but other times, you shift the words around for emphasis - which is why that other post showed about ten possibilities for Russian. It’s not always easy or possible for an intepreter to replicate emphasis, so again - you might be forced to build a plain sentence in your own language and then, if you have time, add a short ‘and let me stress how important turtles are’.)