Five Simple Maxims

I couldn't resist this extract from a letter by R. Beske from Seattle in yesterday's Financial Times.

On information (following an article by Michael Skapinker ' Companies need to cut through big data hype'), Beske writes these five maxims:

-The information you have is not what you want.

-The information you want is not what you need.

-The information you need is not what you can obtain.

-The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.

-What you are willing to pay will get you exactly the information you already have.

I think these sage aphorisms apply to many walks of life, and no doubt to our efforts in translation.

Translation: good for business

It is refreshing to learn that the Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov employs a team of translators to translate the up to 300 pages of reports, analysis and news items he reads per day in order to keep abreast of developments in the markets he is involved in (Financial Times 17th November). 

The deadlines must be tight, but no doubt the people doing the work do not mind in the least.

This is someone who chooses not to rely on some approximation to a translation obtained online, and wants to know the exact meaning of the written information on which he bases critical decisions.

Realizing that a good translation makes good business is what we, as translators, need to do. We also need to ensure that our customers and prospective customers know this as well.

Language Gambling

News from the gambling group Betfair (Financial Times 10th November 2012) which is parting company with its UK director and laying off staff, beginning with 50 translators.

The explanation is a shift in strategy which will see the company reduce the number of languages available on its websites in Asia, Eastern Europe and Nordics. This is in order to focus on countries that are “more strategically attractive”.

I am not much of a gambler and will not be patronising this platform any time soon, but it is always a pity to see a cut in the number of language versions offered by any company. The world will be a much poorer place if the only languages available are English and perhaps Mandarin.

Diversity is a luxury we cannot afford to be without.

Beware of the Cat

Couldn’t resist reproducing this (Comment by Clive Cookson - Financial Times) here.

‘Anyone who has used Google’s translation service to turn a foreign language web page into English will know how much help it still needs.

To test it, I requested an English translation of the French Wikipedia entry for chat (cat). Here is part of the response:

“It also means more familiarly by the cat pussy and pussy by pussy. This term, dating back from 1560, comes from mine, popular name of the cat in Gallo-Romance. This word is the origin of the expression ‘at the crack of dawn’, which means ‘good morning’.”

Admittedly, Google can do much better with its more specialised machine translation services. But even the most advanced technology for understanding, generating or translating human language by computer lags far behind the forecasts of AI (artificial intelligence) pioneers 30 or 40 years ago...’

So caveat emptor, or should it be cave canem or is that felis ?

Outside the Box

Extract from a recent article by Sam Taylor in the FT on the art of translation.

‘What you are translating is never simply a series of signs or letters on a page but a set of unspoken assumptions and values....you can’t translate a pun...you have to think laterally. Which is how the British leader Zebigbos becomes Mykingdomforanos’ (in Astérix)’.

Ah yes, translation is often thinking laterally, thinking outside the box. Now that is very difficult to translate into French. In fact French thinking is likely to be anything but lateral or outside the proverbial.

How would you translate it ? ‘Sortir des sentiers battus’, ‘sortir du cadre’ ?

As you can see the French seems to see this as leaving the road or breaking out of a frame (cadre), a type of transgression. 

The English (by which I mean English language) mind sees it as a brilliant solution to difficult puzzle.

This is now languages somehow manage to see the world differently.

On the difficulty of translating Mallarmé

A review by Ian Thomson in the FT 25th August 2012 of a new translation by Peter Manson of Mallarmé’s poetry reminded me of my own attempts to come to grips with this most innovative of poets. It took place in a dissertation on Un coup de dés which was part of my degree course many years ago.

It all seems so simple - ‘La chair est triste et j’ai lu tous les livres’ is translated by ‘The flesh is sad and I’ve read all the books’.

‘Un coup de dés’ (title of his most mind-blowing poem) is translated by ‘A dice-throw’. 

This could have been rendered by ‘a throw of the dice’ but of course this implies that some person or agent is throwing the dice, whereas the translator has chosen dice-throw because of its more disembodied impersonal feel. 

After all chance is just that, a random phenomenon, for which no one or no thing is responsible.

But of course the main feature of this particular work is its typography.

The words seem to fly off the page in some great primeval explosion, in which  language is rendered meaningless and becomes the robotic utterance of mere words.

Here Mallarmé seems to have intuited the paradox of a world in which order and chaos are hand in hand, one threatening to overwhelm the other, but never quite succeeding.

Not really translatable. You either appreciate this train of thought or not.