ACCEPTING CORRECTIONS WITH HUMILITY – INCLUDING
WHERE MY EDUCATION FAILS TO SERVE ME WELL AND THE CRUCIAL FACTOR OF WHAT PEOPLE
(INCLUDING ME) REALLY SEE IN WHAT I WRITE
I do most of my work in the form of translation projects for translation agencies abroad, online. Probably the most frustrating thing about my work is when, after I have submitted a completed translation project to someone who is the project manager allocated to it, that project manager gets back to me insisting that they have something to say about certain English expressions that I have used in my translated product, even though their mother tongue is not English like mine is. Sometimes they merely point out minor typos but from time to time they also make very good but unexpected correction suggestions that I am compelled to agree with, or at least appreciate whole-heartedly. This happens even though I undertake my work with great care: I’m committed to thorough consideration and scrutinising of the content of the original as well as the expressions I use in my translation product. I certainly know that a casual and “rush” approach when translating anything that is supposed to be formal in some way is a very bad idea. But there are times when I struggle to translate a really difficult phrase in French or German with confidence and conviction, but I always put something that reflects a definite level of consideration and a diligent and sincere approach, even if I do have to insert a note which points out that I am not too sure about it.
I have worked for people in countries all over the world: the list includes the Czech Republic, Thailand, Lithuania, and Ecuador to name a few. I definitely don’t always speak the native language of the project manager giving me a translation project. But when they do have something in my translation work to criticise, sometimes I wonder if it was something to do with the learning of their own language which helped them to catch what I missed, or imagine something that I, for all my own education and knowledge, just couldn’t. Ultimately it is a matter of what they “see in the material”, and not just the concept of merely understanding the words on the paper (or should that be the screen?) as a message that exists to convey some sort of information, and only that, in language which is (well, certainly should be, if my work deserves any kind of merit) linguistically correct. (Of course, I should add that sometimes I need to realise the particular register is supposed to play a role beyond just stating something that makes sense; like persuasion.)
For example, “destinataires” is the language of emails in French – not the correspondence contained therein – in that it means “recipients”. Here I “see something” in this French word and its English counterpart which I don’t think everyone would from the start: when you write an email you have to insert the list of recipients, the person(s) whom it is “destined” for. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that just because an email is destined for someone doesn’t mean that they actually will RECEIVE it as the recipient (and even if they do, will they actually open it and read it? But that’s another subject.)
I want to compare writing a translation to writing a story. When I write a translation for someone else I’m not the author of the content of the original or the story behind it, like I would be if I wrote a story. And while works of fiction always have a fixed, rigidly defined beginning and end, translations usually refer to real-life events and situations that are but parts of a bigger ongoing picture. For example, I’ve translated lease documents before, but these are just part of the bigger story of someone renting property for a given purpose and for whatever period of time. I have translated French and German marketing material knowing full well that it would end up as part of the business history of whatever company requested the English version. But neither of these things are any of my business; I just play the role of translator. Compare this to the fact that, if I write a story… well, whether it’s good or bad, everything in it is my business, simply because I decide everything that happens in it. It all depends on my imagination. And I call upon my imagination when writing translations as well. But anything can happen in stories – maybe you’ve seen cartoons where a character walks off a cliff or something and is then walking on thin air, but they don’t fall until they realise that they are not standing on anything. And there lies the difference between the imagination required for story writing and the imagination required for competent translation work: when I do translation work I have to agree that I can somehow justify or explain everything that I write. Mind you, like I said earlier, in all honesty, there are times in my work where I leave a comment for the project manager asking for someone else’s opinion about something because, as far as I see it, that is the only thing that helps me to agree that I really am conveying the right and accurate meaning about something to someone else… a paying customer, no less.
That said, this is the point where I start talking about the song Friday (Rebecca Black). Yes, that awful song. If I’m not mistaken, it originally came out on Youtube. I say this because one thing I have noticed about it is how the lyrics depend on the video to let people know what’s happening in the song – show people what they are supposed to think…
“7 am, waking up in the morning,
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs,
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal,
Seeing everything, the time is going,
Ticking on and on, everybody’s rushing,
Gotta get down to the bus stop, gotta catch my bus,
I see my friends…
Kicking in the front seat,
Sitting in the back seat,
Gotta make my mind up,
Which seat can I take?”
Consider this: try to imagine the average person who knows the song, and then ask, what are the chances that they first listened to it on Youtube, where they saw the video accompanying it? I’d say it’s pretty high, wouldn’t you? Although it’s widely agreed that the song is bad in several ways (I certainly agree that Rebecca was a fool to pursue fame as a singer with it), I’d say that one of these is that the lyrics, at least certainly those of the first verse (above), just defy any form of sensible or logical explanation and they quite literally jump from one thing to the next, seemingly at random, and it’s all very quick. At the very start of the video she wakes up in bed and sits up, and sings a little bit, then all of a sudden she’s standing somewhere else indoors, and she sings a bit more then walks away; next thing we know she’s at a bus stop. By this point, she has specifically mentioned in the song that she has got to catch a bus, yet her friends turn up out of the blue in a car for some reason, at which point she decides to take her lift with them – what? And then she says, “which seat should I take?” even though there’s only one left (if you watch the video you’ll see that there are four people in the car before Rebecca gets in it; something no-one involved in the production of the music video seemed to notice, but that observation is part of a “A normal day for Rebecca Black” joke floating around on the Internet).
But what I’m trying to say is: I would say that if people don’t have the option of watching the video with the song when they hear it for the first time, it is not unlikely that they will end up confused and not knowing what to think – even if it is only for a bit. For example, when she says that she’s got to go down to the bus stop to catch a bus, and then she sees her friends, and then all of a sudden she starts talking about seats… can you imagine, “oh, so her friends are in a car, are they?... I didn’t catch that until just now, when she said the words ‘front seat’ and ‘back seat’ after she happened to mention that she had seen them at all… I just thought that they would have been standing at the bus stop…” Like, what are we supposed to think?
I do most of my work in the form of translation projects for translation agencies abroad, online. Probably the most frustrating thing about my work is when, after I have submitted a completed translation project to someone who is the project manager allocated to it, that project manager gets back to me insisting that they have something to say about certain English expressions that I have used in my translated product, even though their mother tongue is not English like mine is. Sometimes they merely point out minor typos but from time to time they also make very good but unexpected correction suggestions that I am compelled to agree with, or at least appreciate whole-heartedly. This happens even though I undertake my work with great care: I’m committed to thorough consideration and scrutinising of the content of the original as well as the expressions I use in my translation product. I certainly know that a casual and “rush” approach when translating anything that is supposed to be formal in some way is a very bad idea. But there are times when I struggle to translate a really difficult phrase in French or German with confidence and conviction, but I always put something that reflects a definite level of consideration and a diligent and sincere approach, even if I do have to insert a note which points out that I am not too sure about it.
I have worked for people in countries all over the world: the list includes the Czech Republic, Thailand, Lithuania, and Ecuador to name a few. I definitely don’t always speak the native language of the project manager giving me a translation project. But when they do have something in my translation work to criticise, sometimes I wonder if it was something to do with the learning of their own language which helped them to catch what I missed, or imagine something that I, for all my own education and knowledge, just couldn’t. Ultimately it is a matter of what they “see in the material”, and not just the concept of merely understanding the words on the paper (or should that be the screen?) as a message that exists to convey some sort of information, and only that, in language which is (well, certainly should be, if my work deserves any kind of merit) linguistically correct. (Of course, I should add that sometimes I need to realise the particular register is supposed to play a role beyond just stating something that makes sense; like persuasion.)
For example, “destinataires” is the language of emails in French – not the correspondence contained therein – in that it means “recipients”. Here I “see something” in this French word and its English counterpart which I don’t think everyone would from the start: when you write an email you have to insert the list of recipients, the person(s) whom it is “destined” for. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that just because an email is destined for someone doesn’t mean that they actually will RECEIVE it as the recipient (and even if they do, will they actually open it and read it? But that’s another subject.)
I want to compare writing a translation to writing a story. When I write a translation for someone else I’m not the author of the content of the original or the story behind it, like I would be if I wrote a story. And while works of fiction always have a fixed, rigidly defined beginning and end, translations usually refer to real-life events and situations that are but parts of a bigger ongoing picture. For example, I’ve translated lease documents before, but these are just part of the bigger story of someone renting property for a given purpose and for whatever period of time. I have translated French and German marketing material knowing full well that it would end up as part of the business history of whatever company requested the English version. But neither of these things are any of my business; I just play the role of translator. Compare this to the fact that, if I write a story… well, whether it’s good or bad, everything in it is my business, simply because I decide everything that happens in it. It all depends on my imagination. And I call upon my imagination when writing translations as well. But anything can happen in stories – maybe you’ve seen cartoons where a character walks off a cliff or something and is then walking on thin air, but they don’t fall until they realise that they are not standing on anything. And there lies the difference between the imagination required for story writing and the imagination required for competent translation work: when I do translation work I have to agree that I can somehow justify or explain everything that I write. Mind you, like I said earlier, in all honesty, there are times in my work where I leave a comment for the project manager asking for someone else’s opinion about something because, as far as I see it, that is the only thing that helps me to agree that I really am conveying the right and accurate meaning about something to someone else… a paying customer, no less.
That said, this is the point where I start talking about the song Friday (Rebecca Black). Yes, that awful song. If I’m not mistaken, it originally came out on Youtube. I say this because one thing I have noticed about it is how the lyrics depend on the video to let people know what’s happening in the song – show people what they are supposed to think…
“7 am, waking up in the morning,
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs,
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal,
Seeing everything, the time is going,
Ticking on and on, everybody’s rushing,
Gotta get down to the bus stop, gotta catch my bus,
I see my friends…
Kicking in the front seat,
Sitting in the back seat,
Gotta make my mind up,
Which seat can I take?”
Consider this: try to imagine the average person who knows the song, and then ask, what are the chances that they first listened to it on Youtube, where they saw the video accompanying it? I’d say it’s pretty high, wouldn’t you? Although it’s widely agreed that the song is bad in several ways (I certainly agree that Rebecca was a fool to pursue fame as a singer with it), I’d say that one of these is that the lyrics, at least certainly those of the first verse (above), just defy any form of sensible or logical explanation and they quite literally jump from one thing to the next, seemingly at random, and it’s all very quick. At the very start of the video she wakes up in bed and sits up, and sings a little bit, then all of a sudden she’s standing somewhere else indoors, and she sings a bit more then walks away; next thing we know she’s at a bus stop. By this point, she has specifically mentioned in the song that she has got to catch a bus, yet her friends turn up out of the blue in a car for some reason, at which point she decides to take her lift with them – what? And then she says, “which seat should I take?” even though there’s only one left (if you watch the video you’ll see that there are four people in the car before Rebecca gets in it; something no-one involved in the production of the music video seemed to notice, but that observation is part of a “A normal day for Rebecca Black” joke floating around on the Internet).
But what I’m trying to say is: I would say that if people don’t have the option of watching the video with the song when they hear it for the first time, it is not unlikely that they will end up confused and not knowing what to think – even if it is only for a bit. For example, when she says that she’s got to go down to the bus stop to catch a bus, and then she sees her friends, and then all of a sudden she starts talking about seats… can you imagine, “oh, so her friends are in a car, are they?... I didn’t catch that until just now, when she said the words ‘front seat’ and ‘back seat’ after she happened to mention that she had seen them at all… I just thought that they would have been standing at the bus stop…” Like, what are we supposed to think?
