Dear All,
‘Context is king ’. This is a well-known aphorism in linguistics, and it is especially true of translation. Consider that ‘words’ are like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and ‘context’ is the picture as a whole, the completed jigsaw puzzle.
I encounter this problem occasionally when trying to deal with ANS items. As well as one might know the Salesian world (and have been fortunate enough to visit many provinces), the reality is that certain news items do not contain enough context for the translator to know what they are actually talking about! And you cannot always trust the original to be without error. Only recently I came across the phrase giochi a stand in a news item referring to some Salesian event in Sicily. It was a new one on me: were they talking about the sorts of games you find at the annual Show, like the hoopla, tin can alley, that sort of thing? Or were these ‘standalone’ games, you know, a kind of bespoke celebration with especially invented games? Or was this just a bit of Sicilian Salesian dialect? The only solution was to ask for context, all of which takes time, and with just 5 minutes per news item available and at 16000 km distance from Rome and slow internet... well... you can imagine.
Anyway, the answer came back, though long after I had sent back a translation, just calling it ‘games’ to be safe. “Sorry, this was a ‘refuso’ [a typo]. It should read giochi e stand,” which means games plus a fairground type of celebration with stalls and booths. The other games were games like soccer, basketball... but that kind of context was missing from the article as it happened.
Or you might receive an outline of some event prepared before it happens, so the person who provides the outline may not in fact have much context to offer. But this does not change the reality for the translator, who only has a few brief numbered or dot points to work on and nothing else.
Another and perhaps far more important example of context was involved when the Giuseppini (the Josephites of St Leonard Murialdo) asked me to translate the Life of their founder. I initially assumed that my knowledge of St John Bosco, Turin, Piedmont, religious life, whatever, would make that a relatively easy task. How wrong I was! Two very different men, with two very different views on a number of crucial issues, and two very different religious traditions. Things that we just assume were all Don Bosco’s invention, that Leonard Murialdo was simply a protégé of Don Bosco’s.... sorry, but the Giuseppini think otherwise! So much care and hundreds of exchanges of email were required to ensure that St Leonard Murialdo was placed in his context, not in Don Bosco’s!
So yes, context is king. But ‘context’ is such a broad term, really, that it may not give us much information, so I invite you to read the Best Practice where the idea of ‘context’ is teased out a bit to make it clearer just what it is and how important it is for the translator. And it will also give you the kinds of things you can ask of the person who has commissioned a particular translation, to remind them of the kinds of context you need.
