{"id":1711,"date":"2013-02-19T15:41:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T15:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp\/2013\/02\/19\/translation-is-not-about-words-its-about-what-the-words-are-about\/"},"modified":"2017-03-13T18:41:52","modified_gmt":"2017-03-13T18:41:52","slug":"translation-is-not-about-words-its-about-what-the-words-are-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/2013\/02\/19\/translation-is-not-about-words-its-about-what-the-words-are-about\/","title":{"rendered":"Translation is Not About Words. It\u2019s About What the Words are About."},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kevin Hendzel<\/span><\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

Subject-matter knowledge is not just \u201cimportant\u201d to translation. It\u2019s the very essence of translation.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Buried deep in the bedrock of every profession are certain truths that are universally understood and accepted by modern practitioners. In medicine, for example, those include a recognition that the human body exists in a physical universe subject to the laws of science and not to a fictitious universe of mysterious spirits accessible to the chosen, pre-ordained few, a concept that had dominated human medicine for millennia.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As a result, medical doctors strolling through a cocktail party today would never encounter questions from their friends, patients or colleagues about the effectiveness of specific spells, incantations or charms in their medical practice. Mysticism and superstition in medicine have been duly and effectively discarded in the proverbial dustbin of history.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Not so for translation.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
We translators can spend decades of rigorous effort in the lead-up to our translation careers \u2013 and certainly during such careers \u2013 developing the crucial subject-matter expertise essential to the translation enterprise.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
This process involves learning highly complex concepts in science, technology, philosophy, law, finance, business, music and dozens of other fields through immersion in the lab, lecture hall, classroom, production line, fabrication plant, trading floor or boardroom.<\/span><\/span>
This prolonged effort is crucial to our ability to precisely convey all these concepts across language barriers.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
But no matter how many fields we master as translators, awaiting us at that same cocktail party will be the eternal question that has been asked of translators since the Tower of Babel:<\/span><\/span>
\u201cHow many languages do you speak?\u201d<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
It\u2019s a question that suggests an innocent, almost whimsical notion of translation as a low-stress career of light reflection, picked up effortlessly while flipping through phrase books and sipping sweet tea in the afternoon shade.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
The reality is rather more sobering. In my case, for example, I\u2019d arrive at such parties after having worked out certain issues in my translation work such as the principles underlying optical excitation of Rayleigh waves by interband light absorption or coherent acoustic resistance to an electron-hole plasma or approaches to calculating the electronic structure of alloys.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
So my response to this friendly question of \u201chow many languages do you speak?\u201d would be a bit playful and would always be delivered with a smile:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI speak science.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Words or ideas?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the fault of our polite party-goer asking the \u201chow many languages\u201d question, since it\u2019s just an attempt to strike up a friendly conversation.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

And there\u2019s no help from our culture, either \u2013 especially in the U.S. \u2013 where translators are looked upon with deep suspicion as these bizarre mythological creatures of ambiguous progeny whose field of endeavor is certainly trivial and should have been rendered mute by automated translation decades ago.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
At the core of this fallacy is the ancient and somewhat quaint notion that translation is just about language \u2013 about words.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This can\u2019t be true, though, because language itself isn\u2019t even about words. The words of language are just the symbols we manipulate to paint meaning into our world \u2014 to project pictures that convey the underlying message, concept or idea.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

So translators do not translate languages or words. They translate ideas.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And in today\u2019s commercial translation market, that means we translate the ideas of people who are deeply invested in some highly complicated activities and are willing to pay us to convey them.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Since we must understand those ideas to do this accurately, we must know not only what we know, but we must also know what they know, too.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
A solitary focus on language<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What happens if a translator understands the languages, but not the ideas? How do those translations work out in the real world?<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Short answer: Catastrophically.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The translation world today appears to be overflowing with novice (but certainly well-meaning) translators flailing about in dangerous waters infested with their own conceptual blindness. This is an inevitable outcome of the persistent and wrongheaded solitary focus on language to the exclusion of content.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

It\u2019s why students entering translation studies programs would be well advised to learn a great deal about the world before attempting to investigate ways to convey that knowledge \u2013 which is exactly what translation is \u2013 lest they end up conveying a disturbing and very costly lack of knowledge, an outcome that embarrasses both the novice translator and the poor unsuspecting client who, after all, thinks translation is just a matter of \u201cspeaking a foreign language.\u201d<\/span><\/span>
<\/span>
Russian has no words for that<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

One of my favorite stories that nicely illustrates this dilemma originated in an inquiry we once received from a U.S. manufacturer of a water purification system based on a novel yet straightforward technology that they wished to sell in Russia. The company had hired a translator \u2013 a Russian woman \u2013 to translate their technical documentation from English into Russian. They were getting nowhere with this approach and called me up to see if I could determine why.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u201cEvery time we give her documentation to translate she says \u2018Russian has no words for any of that,\u2019\u201d the manager told me. \u201cThen she gets on the phone and speaks Russian all day with her friends. I don\u2019t understand how she can speak that much Russian and not be able to translate what we need her to,\u201d he said. \u201cIs it true that Russian has no words for water purification?\u201d<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
I assured him that Russian has a highly sophisticated technical lexicon, and in any event, it was unlikely that the language of Mendeleev \u2013 the author of the Periodic Table of Elements, after all \u2013 would prove utterly helpless in the face of reverse osmosis.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
It was certainly possible that this woman was simply unaware of the technology (or was feigning ignorance of it), but in practice her apparent complete lack of any technical awareness was derailing the company\u2019s efforts for reasons having nothing to do with language.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
Line or link?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A more problematic case are translations that describe a world that doesn\u2019t, can\u2019t or will never exist.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

And that happens because the translator doesn\u2019t have the real-world knowledge to know what doesn\u2019t, can\u2019t or will never exist.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
There are countless thousands of examples of this phenomenon. One is the word \u201cliniya\u201d in Russian, which means a physical telephone line such as a hard-wired copper landline. Unfortunately, the exact same Russian word also means a radio link to a remote terminal, satellite or cell tower, which is what cellphones use.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span>
The only way to know which is correct is to possess the most rudimentary knowledge of telecommunications.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
Alas, there never seems to be a limit to the English translations of this word that describe a world in which a physical copper wire is magically soldered to a satellite orbiting at an altitude of 42,000 kilometers.<\/span><\/span>
<\/span><\/span>
Endless challenges<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly true that even the most experienced, careful and knowledgeable translators will find themselves in uncertain subject-matter territory at various points throughout their careers. It\u2019s one of the many reasons to involve an expert colleague with greater subject-matter expertise in the review process while getting up to speed on technical concepts \u2013 a process that can and does take years.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Final appeal<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the event that I\u2019ve failed to be convincing up to this point, consider again the title of this blog post:<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Translation is not about words. It\u2019s about what the words are about. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The message here is that translation is about meaning, not about words. To illustrate this idea, I use the same words in both sentences. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

The only reason the meaning conveys is that the sentences are in different frames of reference. It\u2019s the meaning underlying those frames of reference that delivers the idea.<\/span><\/span>
<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span> <\/div>\n
Reposted with permission from <\/span>https:\/\/www.kevinhendzel.com\/<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kevin Hendzel Subject-matter knowledge is not just \u201cimportant\u201d to translation. It\u2019s the very essence of translation. Buried deep in the bedrock of every profession are certain truths that are universally understood and accepted by modern practitioners. In medicine, for example, those include a recognition that the human body exists in a physical universe subject to the laws of science and not to a fictitious universe of mysterious spirits accessible to the chosen, pre-ordained few, a concept that had dominated human medicine for millennia. As a result, medical doctors strolling through a cocktail party today would never encounter questions from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[255],"class_list":["post-1711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1873,"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions\/1873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}