I’ve been a professional translator for over 10 years, and I have to admit that online dictionaries have saved me more than a few times. But as dictionaries and, more importantly, translating programs become ever more sophisticated, does that mean I will become obsolete? I sure wish that were the case, but I’m afraid I’m here to stay.

I thoroughly enjoy translating poetry. But some of the voluminous financial documents I’ve done over the years contained sinewy sentences running over a page in length and more subordinate clauses in a single paragraph than an entire Faulkner novel — enough to engender midnight bouts of despair. Next come the verbose academic diatribes of retired professors that can provoke habit-inducing behaviors. And of course, all the mundane, mind-numbing assignments that probably make up 80% of translation work: news and announcements, brochures and manuals, business letters and web pages. Luckily, translation programs like those provided by Google and Babelfish can handle the latter to a reasonable degree; they at least convey the gist of a text.

Such programs, while convenient in a casual setting, still have a long way to go before they become truly viable. The fact that their translations need to be heavily edited isn’t the problem. It’s all the meaning that is lost, especially between Japanese and English. Linguistic science tells us these languages are worlds apart. For a native-English speaker, Japanese is a level-five language, meaning the hardest to master (a distinction it shares with Arabic). Creating a program that can negotiate such vast differences seems like a quixotic dream perhaps exceeded in difficulty only by the pursuit of robust artificial intelligence.

One approach to the problem would be a program that translates by consensus or “open-source,” so to speak. Wikipedia provides the most convenient analogy. Its entries are by no means absolute, but rather refined through increasing participation in the project. A program could always map out the structure of a given sentence (remember diagramming sentences?) and use those discrete values to create a correspondence in the target language.

But perhaps it would be best to somehow begin compiling publicly available translations of identical or similar structures and finding a kind of average or typical rendering of those structures. Like Wikipedia, people could submit suggestions. Already, the website www.alc.co.jp searches the internet for all known translations of a given word. Not all the translations it uncovers are correct, per se, but it is very useful and you can generally determine an approximation through comparison.

The first problem is that even though generally accepted grammar structures are finite, possible combinations of words and their meanings within those structures approach infinity. Mapping structures, compiling known translations, refining the system — it all seems so Sisyphean, even for a computer or enormous open-source project. Obviously, scientists relish the challenge, but my skepticism remains. How do you translate “muzukashii?” Its basic meaning is “difficult,” but it often means “impossible.” Think of the catastrophic consequences that could result from that mistranslation. And that’s just an ordinary adjective.

This problem — meaning in context — became clear to me years ago when
I was doing some unusual copy-editing at a translation company. A Japanese woman was writing desperate letters to an English-speaking lover who had left her. She was having her letters translated into English and his letters translated back into Japanese. For a while, I only got to see translations of the outgoing letters, and it was apparent something was wrong. Cross-cultural, cross-lingual relationships can have more than your usual disconnect, but this was uncanny.

I asked to see all the original letters. The translations were relatively faithful on the surface, but something was missing. What were they really saying to each other? Implicit meanings were being lost. More empathy (and audacity) was required of the translators. Greater interpretation had to come into play. (A key distinction is helpful here: “interpretation” pertains to extracting meanings from a text, while “translation” involves rendering those “interpretations” into another language.) All translation entails some level of interpretation, though it seems the most important ones require a lot. When interpretation is already so difficult for humans, I’m not sure how a computer or program is going to cope.

Our every interaction with someone demands interpretation, and that is mediated in nebulous ways by what we know of the person and the context. Even with an anonymous text where those bearings are stripped away, we need to interpret the tone to determine meaning. Then there’s that most modern of afflictions: irony. Throw in humor, understatement, hyperbole, satire, oxymoron and any of the dozens of figures of speech, and you have “no small task” in translating. Language can be a nightmare as much as a miracle.

People use translation programs for their own convenience but also at their own risk. Will the risk decrease? Of course. But the nightmare won’t go away. The chances that scientists will come up with something we can trust over your seasoned translator are about that same as that couple getting back together: rather “muzukashii,” I would say.

Ry Beville maintains a site of poetry translations at www.nakaharachuya.com. This commentary originally appeared in Metropolis magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp).

Latest 15 of 59 Total Comments Show All

• 

  cleo at 11:23 AM JST - 21st July

  cat -

  Perhaps for people with the expertise and the inclination to spend their time 4-wheel-driving around undeveloped countries, it might be more interesting. Personally, I'm not interested in that, neither am I qualified to dig wells or train engineers, to give kids inoculations or run credit schemes.

  The engineers, builders, medical staff, etc etc are trained professionals doing a professional job and getting paid for what they do. The projects involve vast amounts of money, and literally change people's lives. Why on earth would you expect them to leave an important aspect of the job - communicating their plans, recommendations and requirements to overseas/local counterparts - to well-meaning amateurs? Translation is like many other 'commodities' - you get what you pay for. At one end you have the free but totally useless (at least in the case of J-E/E-J) Bablefish, at the other you have professional translators who can be relied upon not to throw a spanner in the works by mistranslating or producing gobbledegook, but who expect (and need - we all gotta earn a living) to be paid for what they do.

• 

  sarcasm123 at 02:41 PM JST - 21st July

  Coligny

  Mate, I don't know if you are still here, or if you have run off to hide, but you are about to get yourself into trouble. The reason why? I am going to ask you for some examples that support your claims.

  "Japanese language is really just a puddle of mud with as much obscurantism as possible, rules that are more often broken than followed and bail outs that hide behind "the context" to make sense of anything, while being unable to retrieve any context because nothing make anysense (cathc 22)."

  Well, as I wrote above: let's hear some examples! And I am looking especially forward to exampes about "rules that are more often broken than followed", because a few lines further you claim...

  "And Japanese fail miserably where German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and many other suceed."

  Whenever I hear the words "rules" and "exceptions" the first couple of things to come to mind usually include "French", "English" and a couple of other languages. Let's hear 'em, those rules in Japanese that are so often broken! And after that, you can give us a list of all irregular verbs in Japanese, English, German, and French, and we will compare their lenghts!

  "Again, for precision nothing beat the German."

  I dare to say that you, my dear, probably don't know German. Sure, "der die das" seems fun at first. But to say this increases precision? I think not. Did old Greek and Latin have a higher precision than current languages? If so, why did they become dead languages?

  "Deeper meaning through kanjis ? in europe we call this rebuses, it's considered as a game for little kids, not as a full language."

  In Europe wo do not call this rebuse, we call it "subtlety" or "nuance", and I can assure you that even the "supperior" German, English and French contain plenty of it.

  "Even the Vietnamese"

  Ho ho ho! Even the .... Vietnamese!!

  "Metaphor or other stylistic tools and play of words seems to be lost on 99% of the population."

  Examples~! Examples~! Are you saying that all those Japanese who use "目の中へ入れても痛くない" have no clue about what they are saying? When they say "助け船を出す" do they actually run off to get a boat? When "親の顔が見たい" that they actually want to see the faces? When they use "軌道に乗る" they actually think something is entering an orbit? How about "心の琴線に触れる"?

  I think you have abslutely no idea what you are talking about. What's more, most of it is just caused by frustration.

  But let's continue:

  "Yeah, take a bloke from Hokkaido, make him speak to a bloke from Okinawa. Enjoy the misunderstandings."

  Hokkaido and Okinawa are how many km apart from each other? In my tiny home country - which could fit more than 10 times between Hokkaido and Okinawa - people from provinces more than 50km away from the capital need subtitles on television to be understood!!

• 

  Xennon at 03:09 PM JST - 21st July

  Sarcasm,

  I think you just brought the pwn out on Coligny. I will be amazed if s/he comes back to try and answer your questions. Well done!

• 

  imagawa at 06:21 AM JST - 22nd July

  To say that there is no creativity in a translating is very wrong, granted the original may not be yours, but what you make of it is. Yes, the object is to say in a second language what has been said in a first language, but to do so with some style. Creating a sentence to say exactly what has been said takes creativity, it’s your job to make the best of it. I will not be translating from Japanese for a very long time, but I have translated from Spanish to English & English to Spanish & there is such scope for saying exactly what is needed but doing so as beautifully as you can. There are nightmare jobs though & advertising is the one that I hate above all others, so little is said yet needs to impart so much. Added to which you have to work with such pedantic flakes who don’t know what you are doing but know that they could do it better. Cleo. To do this for a full time job? No way! A very, very small percentage of the translations I have done were interesting, the bulk of the rest tedious & a very few so horrendous that I felt I would never speak or understand any language ever again. I wish you well, but rest assured I will never be in competition with you for work.

  BTW I thought it was “eat a tacky mess”? Might explain some of the funny looks I get.

• 

  electric2004 at 09:08 PM JST - 22nd July

  Sarkasmus:

  If you believe it or not, German language can be very precise, but also very vague - just depends on the choice of words. Yes, "der die das" makes it difficult for non-Germans to ever learn correctly and not to confuse. But hey, almost same for Spanish, French and Italian, although there are only 2 genders. Of course most of the genders in all these languages are different.

  And, German language is more rich in words than standard English (if this exists). Like Japanese language, German language has words for

  "the day before yesterday" (Vorgestern) and "the day after tomorrow" (Uebermorgen).

  Such words also exist in the same way for "week, month, and year".

  But, unfortunately, German language also has exceptions. This is hard for German kids and students, too.

  Cheers.

• 

  Nessie at 10:33 AM JST - 23rd July

  Borsct wrote--

  It has never been the case that the translation was bad. It has always been the case that the original text (written by a native speaker of Japanese and in Japanese) was poorly written

  You nailed it on the first post.

  In my technical editing, it's not uncommon for the Japanese author to rewrite his or her paper according to changes in the English version made by an intuitive Japanese translator and issues raised by a bewildered English-language editor. Organizational problems, missing steps of logic, internal inconsistency, blatant errors of fact, unsupported conclusions, innumeracy -- it's brutal.

  Proper translation requies intuition and a respect for the reader.

• 

  papasmurfinjapan at 11:43 AM JST - 23rd July

  Some of it is humdrum of course, but you also get to read a lot of stuff (some of it secret) that would never come your way otherwise, which can be pretty interesting.

  Yes, those NDAs and licensing contracts are a barrel of laughs. :)

• 

  cleo at 11:48 AM JST - 23rd July

  It has never been the case that the translation was bad. It has always been the case that the original text (written by a native speaker of Japanese and in Japanese) was poorly written

  If the original Japanese is unintelligible then it's impossible to translate. The translator either has to go back to the writer to find out what was meant (leading to an acceptable, accurate translation and possibly a much-needed revision of the original); or guess at the meaning (and probably get it wrong); or fudge over it, submitting something that is less than elegant or downright confusing. In the last two cases the translator is failing to do his/her job.

  If an interior decorator notices that the wall he's been asked to paint is about to fall down, he doesn't just slap the paint on thicker and hope no one will notice.

• 

  papasmurfinjapan at 11:59 AM JST - 23rd July

  In the last two cases the translator is failing to do his/her job

  In principal I agree. But there are many cases where the translator has no access to the original author of the article. The original author: - may be dead.

  • may be anonymous.

  • may be known, but due to the nature of the translation cannot be contacted for client confidentiality reasons. (For example, I do patent translations for a multinational that wants to keep tabs on Japanese technology. As a client of the competitor, I can't just call up the inventor or patent attorney of the Japanese patent and ask them to clarify things for me.

  • may not want to help. Some people, especially in literary circles (or so I have heard) do not want to be contacted by translators to go over what they consider to be trivialities. They either consider themselves too important or too busy to waste time with someone translating their work into English - a decision most probably made by their publisher, and not them personally.

• 

  cleo at 12:11 PM JST - 23rd July

  papasmurf -

  Yes, I realise those are problems. In those cases where the writer cannot be reached for whatever reason, the translator has to add his own comment outlining the problem, not simply gloss over it and hope no one notices.

  In the case of the snotty literary types who think they're too important (can't say I've ever come across that type - most people want their words to be translated faithfully, even if that means them having to take time for a chat with the translator), obviously they're the ones who lose out if the translation that hits the bookstores is not a true reflection of what they intended. It's still the translator's job to point out the problem, probably to the publisher or agent whose responsibility it then is.

• 

  papasmurfinjapan at 12:37 PM JST - 23rd July

  Cleo

  I agree. I don't advocate ignoring it or fudging it, but sometimes making an educated guess with a translator's note outlining the ambiguity is the best one can do.

  I have, however, occasionally come across clients (usually the type that request a translation every 2-3 years for a trade show presentation or something) that treat "comments" as a sign of an inexperienced/unprofessional translator. "You're the translator - don't you know what I mean?" This is mostly due to their ignorance of the process of translating.

  They are often the same people than run a document through a machine translation, then send it to me for "proofreading" in expectation of a lower rate (I charge them the same). Cheap bastards.

• 

  cleo at 01:37 PM JST - 23rd July

  papa -

  We don't need the occasional clients who treat comments as a sign of an inexperienced/unprofessional translator. They're usually the ones who think translating should take no more time than it would to copy out the original, and demand super-short deadlines. They're more than welcome to go find themselves what they consider an experienced, professional one. Less strife for us.

  At the other end of the spectrum are the helpful types who wait till a translation is almost finished, then send in a 'modified' document 'clarifying' what they wrote in the first place; in many cases they've just tweaked the Japanese wording without affecting the meaning at all, but you still have to check the whole thing for the one place where they've changed the whole meaning.

  I don't accept machine translations for proofreading. Like you say, cheap people whose parents aren't joined in holy wedlock. When I get a document to proofread that is over the top, I ask for the Japanese original, translate that and charge them for that.

• 

  Nessie at 06:00 PM JST - 23rd July

  More likely it's impossible to interrogate the author because they're too rarified ever to have written anything except pure gold. Calling the author to task would only ruffle feathers. In such cases, the author's as good as dead, for all practical purposes. And if you should have a heart to heart, you often find that the author him or herself has no idea what he or she's going on about.

  Many's the day that I wanted to interrogate an author or two, preferably by waterboarding.

• 

  cleo at 07:26 PM JST - 23rd July

  Asking for clarification isn't 'calling the author to task'. (At least not the way I do it...softly softly...) (makes mental note never to get on the wrong (wet) side of a plesiosaur interrogation...)

  you often find that the author him or herself has no idea what he or she's going on about

  Yup, had that happen more times than I care to count.

• 

  Nessie at 06:46 PM JST - 24th July

  Asking for clarification isn't 'calling the author to task'.

  It often is interpreted that way, although I admit you probably have a softer touch than I do. Gotta leave the sponge at home next time.

  Even so, plenty of male researchers don't take kindly to answering questions from female translators -- the gender that is in the majority for that profession here. At least my scientist clients are less likely to dissemble than writers in the social sciences. I work with one excellent translator who regularly berates her Ph.D. clients for not knowing their own field. Not to their face, of course.

Register or login to add a comment!