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Who wants to hear the voice of the translator? - 2
Early in my years as a translator, I worked for a publisher and one of my translations was revised by a guy who taught college Economics. He made many changes, some of which I agreed with, and inserted a negative in a sentence that had none in the original. When I complained, he claimed the author was an ass and had got it all wrong. Notice that he did not say there had been a slip in the original, that the author had committed that most common and feared of all mistakes, the error of failing to add a negative where one was required; he did not claim there was a revision or proofreading error: he claimed the author was a jerk and he could not accept such stupidity in a text revised by him.
This same revisor later on published his own treatise on Economics and, hopefully, said things the way he thought they were. His book seems to have achieved a certain degree of success and he seems to be a competent economist - although I am no authority on that: I just translate what those guys write. As a revisor, however, he was a failure. For people who read the book he revised got the wrong impression of what the author had in mind. They bought a book by Professor X but got one from Professor Y instead. A counterfeit.
SHADING
Sometimes, things are not nearly as drastic, but equally misleading. I recently compared several published translations with the respective originals and detected a practice I call shading in English and matização in Portuguese, for want of a better term. Shading takes place when the translator plays a bit with modifiers to give the text a different slant.
For instance, when the original says many and the translator uses the equivalent to most. Or when the original says any and the translation says a large number of. Small things, but small in the appearance only, for they deeply distort meanings. Again, here, the expert in the area did not quite agree with the original and thought it was his (or her) job to "correct" it a bit, which it was not. Of course it is perfectly correct and ethical to add a translator's note calling attention to an error in the original—or rejecting the job altogether—but if you deign to do the job, by all means, try to provide a true translation.
Translators sometimes engage in other - but equally objectionable - types of shading, such as using polite and politically correct expressions where the author was very rude and politically incorrect. In doing so, they may transform a rabid racist pamphlet into a placid comment on current affairs and believe that, in hiding the appearance of venom, they have eliminated the poison itself it and thus done society a service. You cannot contribute to the progress of humankind with bad translations.
BACK TO BUSINESS ONCE MORE
But I stray again. As I said, sometimes you can tell a translation is a mess even before you compare it against the original. So I had a look at the text. As far as I could see, it was all right: not the clumsy translationese intermixed with false friends and straight garbage that plagues so many translations done when the translator works on autopilot, is too pressed for time, or should try a career selling hot dogs on a street corner.
Then I asked to see the original. I already suspected a comparison would prove the translation was good, for it had been done by an experienced professional who knows her own limitations and blows the whistle when assigned the wrong kind of job or when the original has some kind of problem. She had completed the job on schedule and had not blown the whistle, ergo, there was a good chance she was in control. But I had to see. So I compared the translation against the original.
It was a powerpoint presentation, as I said, and powerpoint presentations are usually very difficult to translate, for at least two reasons: the first and more obvious is that Portuguese often needs more room than English, and if the source transparencies are overcrowded, cramming the Portuguese into the space available requires rigid discipline and a lot of creativity, two qualities that don't usually come together; the second is that powerpoint presentation are often meant to make sense only in conjunction with an oral presentation and it is often next to impossible to make head and/or tail of them if you're not present at the talk they were intended to support.
However, my friend had performed the task with flying colors. Her translation reflected exactly what the guy had said, the way he had said it and - the icing on the cake - was written in clear, correct and idiomatic Portuguese, as I said above.
CASE CLOSED?
I wish the case could be declared closed now. Unfortunately, it wasn't. The client revised the translation and produced what she expected a professional translator should have done; show a model of translatorial competence. So I asked the client service manager to ask the secretary to ask her boss for a copy of the revised translation, which I duly received by e-mail.
I must say that the revised text was a lot better than the translation my colleague has provided. Clearer, more detailed and more energetic, probably a better support for the talk. In addition, it included much information that my colleague had not included in her translation - for the very simple reason it was not in the original. In other words, the client wanted the translator to improve on and add to the contents of the original, something that is far beyond the task of any of us.
As a proof that the revised translation could not issue from that original, I translated several of the transparencies back into English and a simple comparison between my back-translation and the original would show that they said different things - even with a very generous allowance for the fact that English is not my first language. Very possibly it would be a very good idea to back-translate the whole revised Portuguese into English and use it as a basis for future presentations into that language, since it was obviously a better text. However, it was equally obvious that no translator could have start with the original and arrive at the revised text, for they said different things.
END OF CASE
Unfortunately, I don't know how the case ended. I am afraid it ended badly for the agency. The client may have paid for the translation but I don't think they entrusted that particular agency with another job. They probably gave the next translation to somebody else and were equally dissatisfied with the results, for such clients cannot understand that our mission is to reproduce what the guys said, the way they said it, as best we can.
By Danilo Nogueira - Professional translator, editor, writer, consultant, trainer - Brazil
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Who wants to hear the voice of the translator? - 2. Is the author an ass? - Translation Articles - Trally.com
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