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Aug 20

Translating 'Foreignness': Interview with Norman Manea and Oana Sânziana Marian, translator of 'The Lair'

Reblogged from Yale Books Blog: Yale University Press London:

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Translated into English for the first time, Norman Manea's The Lair explores the human condition of exile, love, isolation and the disorientation of being submerged in another culture. Here we sit down with Norman Manea and Oana Sanziana Marian, the translator of the new English edition of Manea‘s novel.

Interview with Norman Manea and Oana Sanziana Marian (courtesy of…

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Here's a reblog of a very interesting interview that I stumbled upon today. Norman Manea and one of the translators of his work share their thoughts on the translatability of literary works in a broad sense, and of ”foreignness” in a narrow sense. The account is particularly interesting, since Norman Manea wrote all of his novels in Romanian while being in exile. Can his work still be included in Romanian culture? If you read Professor Manea's reply at the end of the interview, you will see that the answer to this question is affirmative. But what about authors who chose to write in the languages of their adoptive countries such as Nabokov, Conrad or Ionesco? Can they be included in the cultural heritage of their original countries?...

Aug 16

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Have You Ever Experienced a ”Translator’s Block”?

Writers often complain about ”writer’s blocks”. These are periods of time during which they are unable to produce new work. I’m curious whether this term can apply to translators as well. Fortunately, I haven’t experienced any major blocks, however, there have been times when my daily translation output has decreased quite substantially. I couldn’t translate more than 1000 words a day and I couldn’t explain why. Another problem that I often have is that I don’t know whether a sentence that I produce is grammatically correct. I read and re-read the sentence several times and it’s like it loses all sense and becomes just a series of meaningless words… I always have to ask whether a sentence ”sounds right”. More often than not they do, but there are times when I produce nonsense. But this usually happens at the end of a hard day, after I translated a couple of thousand words.

So have you ever experienced blocks? Were they serious? Feel free to share your thoughts on this.

 

*Photo by: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Jun 26

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O Corpora, O Mores!

I have always considered corpora essential for the translation of various specialized texts. I actually believe that one cannot possibly begin to translate without consulting similar texts in the target language (the so-called parallel texts). It is highly essential to experience, to understand and ultimately to interiorize the textual techniques of your field of specialization within the target culture. Otherwise, your translations in the medical field, for instance, will not be in compliance with the standard drafting techniques and your (expert) target recipients will have a hard time understanding your translation.

Nonetheless, there is a risk of over-rating the importance of corpora. Due to their statistical significance and their vastness, we may be tempted to consider them the only norm for specialized or non specialized language. In other words, if a certain expression doesn’t exist in the corpus, we may believe that it doesn’t exist at all. Which is not necessarily true. We have to keep in mind that language and discourse are more than just a collection of words, sentences, paragraphs and texts. Besides, automated translation is greatly based on corpora, and as much progress as this technology has made in the past decade, it still fails to offer human-like results. And this is due to the fact that a machine does not understand the meaning of words, it cannot understand what a text is about. And we, as translators, do not translate words, collocations and sentences, we translate meaning. Or this is what we should do.

So, what is your opinion about corpora and how do you use them?

*Photo by freedigitalphotos.net

Mar 5

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Source text oriented vs. target recipient oriented translations

Source text oriented or target oriented? That is the question. In fact, this has been the question for a long time. Both approaches have their advocates. While some assert that a translation is mainly a ”copy” of the original and it should clearly reflect the structure, tone and  linguistic microstructures of the source text, others maintain that the main function of a translation is to convey the information contained by the source text to a target readership so that is fully comprehensible to the latter. I have to admit that I have always been a strong supporter of the target oriented approach. But this was not without consequences for me. Ten years ago, during the high-school graduation exam (Bacalaureat) we were supposed to translate a text from Romanian (my mother tongue) into English (although the role of this translation was to assess grammar knowledge, I still consider this task inappropriate for a high-school examination). My approach to this translation was ”unorthodox” for the Romanian education system of those days, because I re-wrote the text in order to make it sound as good as possible in Romanian. Since my text had nothing in common with the reference translation (yes, assessors had a reference ”standard” translation) provided by the Ministry of Education, I was quite heavily penalized. Luckily, afterwards I attended one of the best translation schools in Romania where we were taught the principles of functionalism (which, among others, highlights the importance of target oriented translation).

But why is the target oriented approach more suitable for translation? Well, in order to find the answer to this question, we should start by acknowledging the very purpose of a translation: to make a text written in a foreign language accessible to an intended target audience. This target audience should not be aware of the fact that they’re reading a translation. The text should read as smoothly as possible and be completely adapted to their culture. And if this requires altering the original structure, merging two sentences into a single one or even changing the style of the text, then so be it! The only thing that cannot and must not be changed is the message. You might think that translating in these circumstances is very easy. On the contrary, having so many options entails a high degree of responsibility. Clearly, the translator is responsible for every choice he makes. And for this reason, not only does s/he need to have a clear insight of the target culture, but also s/he needs to know what the cultural guidelines of writing a certain text genre are. A translated contract should look exactly like a contract written directly in the target language. An instructions manual should use adequate language, the kind of language the readers are familiar with in such a context. Translators who use the source text as an excuse for their inadequate translations are not professional translators. And will never be!

*Photo by FloatingLemons

Feb 2

Noul număr ATR Flash

A apărut numărul 5 al ATR Flash, revista Asociației Traducătorilor din România. Prezentarea unor evenimente importante pentru traducători de la sfârșitul anului trecut, recomandări de evenimente, articole despre programe utile traducătorilor dar și altele pot fi citite pe site-ul publicației http://www.atrflash.ro/.

Lectură plăcută!

Feb 1

NEW! Smart daily freelance translator tips via twitter

Starting today I will post daily (more or less) smart tips for freelance translators on twitter. All my tweets are now visible on my website. You can also follow me on twitter @thomastolnai and follow my facebook page Tolnai Translations.

Hope you’ll enjoy my tips :) .

Jan 6

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Seminarul virtual Documentația studiilor clinice. O abordare din perspectiva traducătorului.

Anul 2012 debutează în forță pentru ATR. Lunile ianuarie și februarie vă așteaptă cu o serie de seminarii interesante adresate traducătorilor și interpreților. În cadrul semninarului Documentația studiilor clinice. O abordare din perspectiva traducătorului din 20 ianuarie, ora 14, voi încerca să sintetizez principalele tipuri de documente care necesită traducere din cadrul unui studiu clinic, precum și probleme de ordin cultural cu care se confruntă traducătorii unor astfel de documente. Voi enumera și principalele tipuri de studii clinice și termenii aferenți acestora, cu câteva explicații succinte.

Iată și programul celorlalte seminarii virtuale propuse de ATR în ianuarie și februarie:

Vă așteptăm cu drag!

*Photo by Grant Cochrane

Dec 19

Campanie de aderare ATR de sfârșit de an

Ca în fiecare an, Asociația Traducătorilor din România organizează campania de aderare de sfârșit de an. Dacă aderați acum, puteți beneficia de reduceri substanțiale la cotizația pentru 2012. Campania se desfășoară până pe data de 31 ianuarie 2011. Nu ratați această ocazie! Pentru mai multe detalii, accesați site-ul Web ATR.

Merită să aderați. Pentru că uniți suntem mai puternici!

Dec 18

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The Intercultural Brand Consultant. Job Description

Combined expertise has become a valuable asset in a globalized society. Professionals are often required to deal with complex tasks which no longer relate to a single field of expertise. Intercultural brand consultancy would be a profession combining the skills of an intercultural consultant (with everything that this entails) and those of a brand expert/consultant. Before attempting to describe this profession, we need to see whether there is indeed a need for it on the market.

Everybody agrees that the success of an international brand relies heavily on its capacity to adapt to the peculiarities of each market. It has become clear that globalization does not eliminate the differences between cultures, it does not ”level” them, but rather preserves and even enhances them. So understanding the way in which a culture thinks, acts and reacts is crucial to any international brand. Cultural adaptation is the key to success, and when I say adaptation, I don’t refer only to the communication process, but to the entire corporate culture of the brand aiming to invest in a foreign culture. This is where an intercultural brand consultant could have a valuable input.

Now what would be the duties of an intercultural brand consultant? It is important to understand that such a professional is more than a transcreation expert. S/he would not only be involved in the communication process, he would not deal only with the advertising strategy of the brand in the foreign culture, but would rather be involved holistically in the branding process. S/he would need to have solid knowledge of brand theory and brand equity and a very good understanding of the processes of brand management because his/her role would be to offer consultancy in a way that would help the brand become integrated in and adapted to the target culture. Besides branding skills, the intercultural brand consultant should also have excellent intercultural skills. S/he should be able to convey to the client the peculiarities of the target culture,  but also to adapt a branding campaign to the local market and transcreate ads if need be.

This post opens a new chapter on my blog. I will discuss various skills that an intercultural brand consultant would need in his daily tasks. For now I just wanted to give you a brief introduction to this hypothetical profession. So what do you think? Would such a profession make sense in our society? Comments are welcome :) .

 

*Image by Naypong

Dec 7

My View on the Reliability of MT

I feel that I owe some explanations after my first article about machine translation (MT). In my previous post, I stated that machine translation can be a very useful tool, but it cannot and should not replace the human translator. I will very briefly try to explain why, after which I promise to drop the topic for good :) .

The first argument against machine translation (and I would include all engines here, not only Google and Bing) is creativity (or the lack thereof). Everyone agrees that humans are creative creatures, they can create stories, objects, works of arts, to name only a few. And believe it or not, language is probably the greatest creative achievement of the human mind. But not in the sense of a finite object, because language is not something ”made”, it’s something ”in the making” (an activity). This fact lies at the heart of Humboldt’s theory of language and is acknowledged by all modern paradigms of Linguistics. According to this principle every speech act is new even though it is indeed based on our historic linguistic experience. But the way in which we use our linguistic knowledge to create new meaning is completely different from the way a machine uses the corpora of text to ”create” new translations. Humans create new speech acts (in essence, a translation is a speech act) based on meaning and sense, they dress them up with words, which means that the same idea can be expressed in very many ways, using completely different words. A  computer, on the other hand, will always use the same sentence to express a certain idea. And this brings us to the second part of my post.

The second argument against MT is meaning. Every translation course is based on the assumption that the students/trainees attending the course are fluent in at least two languages – their mother tongue and a source language. Clearly, in order for anyone to translate, they have to speak and understand the two languages. In other words, when they read and attempt to translate a text, they will be required to understand it. Not only do they have to make out the meaning of individual words, but also grasp the sense of the whole text. Mind you, it has been proven that the best approach to translation is a text-linguistic approach. So I am going to ask you the following question: Is a computer capable of grasping meaning? Can it understand a text? I’m afraid the answer to this question is no. A translation engine only recognizes words and sentences and uses a statistical model to compare them with parallel structures in the target language corpus in order to come up with the best solution. Wait a minute… Did I say it recognizes words? WRONG! It recognizes signifiers (signifiants) which are only graphic representations. It doesn’t even bother to go beyond signifiers and discover the actual meaning of these representations simply because it can’t! A computer does not speak any language. A computer does not understand meaning. A computer does not read texts, let alone understand them.

It’s true, MT has evolved a lot in the last couple of years and the statistic approach it uses is to a certain extent functional. But the question is, is this really enough? I mean if MT is so great, why does it need post editing? Why does it need human intervention? Yes, I know, some will argue that MT helps increase productivity. But is this all that matters? Does everything come down to money and quantity?…

Maybe a day will come when a computer will be able to fully understand us and yes, to translate flawlessly, but that day, my friends, will be the day computers will fully replace humans in all their activities…

 

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