Analysis: Translators spend their time dealing with linguistic, cultural and ethical challenges - and not just with the text for a tattoo
By Ellen Corbett, Ulster University
What do you think of when you first think of translation? Is it the italic bits on the road signs? Bilingual bills in the Dáil? Or subtitles on a foreign film? And what about translators? What do they do? How do they work? Don't they just plug everything into Google Translate?
At the most basic level, a translator takes a piece of written text from one language and puts it into another (our linguistic cousins, interpreters, deal with spoken language). While computers and computer software do play an integral part in the work of the translator, translation itself involves a lot more than just copy-pasting.
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Translators spend their time spinning plates; balancing language, culture, audience and aims. Before even putting pen to paper a translator might begin by reading a source text. They'll ask themselves 'who wrote this? Why did they write this? Who was their audience? Who will my audience be? What is the aim of the piece?' and go from there. From my own experience translating German and Irish, there are generally three major challenges we translators face.
Linguistic challenges
Probably the first challenge that springs to mind is the linguistic challenge of translation – actually translating the thing! Many people think that every word in a language has a direct counterpart in another, and that a translator can simply translate word-for-word. Unfortunately, this is not always the case and translations can end up being not so good.
Often, translators have to take a sentence or a phrase as a whole, and translate the meaning, rather than the actual words themselves, what we call translating sense-for-sense. Syntax and sentence structure are not always parallel across languages either. Irish puts the verb first in a sentence, English second and it depends in German, with auxiliary verbs appearing right at the very end of sentences. For these reasons (and a few others), Irish and German texts may appear longer than the English, despite containing the same information.
Many people assume that a translator must be fluent in another language. While that is often true, they must be equally confident in their own and understand its nuances. For example, what is the difference between a cabin in the woods and a cottage in the forest? Do they mean exactly the same thing?
Normally, translators work from their learned languages into their first language in order to create the best translations possible, but there is nothing worse than knowing a concept, thing, verb, in another language and not knowing what it is in your own. No one ever talks about the charades, guess work and describing that gets done by translators in the process of their work. I am eternally grateful to my family and friends for putting up with strange phone calls from me asking them what you call a pole that goes up and down in a carpark (a barrier), or what the fancy white fur that people in portraits wear is called (ermine).
Cultural challenges
Sometimes in translation there are concepts that can't be easily conveyed or have no direct translation. In my own experience, I found that there is no direct translation for 'self-raising flour’ in German, and I had to work out how much plain flour and baking powder the reader would have to use instead.
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When I was asked to translate the word ‘home’ into Irish for a tattoo, I had to tell the recipient that there was no direct equivalent, only baile, which could equally mean ‘town’ or ‘village’, or teach which means simply ‘a house’. I mean, you could use a nice seanfhocal; níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin, but who wants that much on your arm when one word in English would do you?
Jokes, puns or any kind of wordplay can be equally as tricky, but also offer us a chance to play with language and draw on the culture of one or both languages. Sometimes new words have to be created, borrowed or taken from an older context and given a new modern meaning. For example, just as in English, a ríomhaire (computer) was not always a machine, but a person who computed important theological dates, times, and planetary movement.
Ethical challenges
Translators might face ethical challenges: should something actually be translated? This is more often seen in languages other than the ones I am familiar and in the translation of religious or controversial texts.
Translation is often seen as an invisible occupation, with many seeing the product but never thinking of the person behind it.
It can also be something that translators might have to think about depending on their audience. For example, in his book Sruth Teangacha, a bilingual Irish/English poetry collection, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn gives four-and-a-half pages to the English-language author’s note, but only half a page to the Irish, saying that, "ní gá dom focail a chur amú ag míniú rudaí a thuigeann tú cheana féin" (I’m not going to waste words explaining things you already know). If one language community understands an aspect of a text inherently, do we need to repeat it? Do we need to change it?
Translation can be tricky and there probably never will be a panacea for all these challenges. So why do people even attempt translation then? Translation is vitally important. It allows us to communicate across language barriers, to participate in a global conversation which makes us think, not just about other languages, but reflect on our own as well, and what we can learn about each other. It conveys often important information and, for some, might be the first glimpse into an otherwise unreachable culture.
Translation is often seen as an invisible occupation, with many seeing the product of this important work but never thinking of the person behind it. Maybe the next time you see a road sign, a new film or a poster, you’ll think of the translator and how tricky their work might have been.
Ellen Corbett is a PhD researcher at Ulster University, looking at 20th and 21st Irish-language poetry in translation.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
