Dear All,
Recently I received a text for translation that was substantial in every respect, especially for its contents and for the number of pages involved. But it became a difficult exercise simply because it wasn’t written or subsequently prepared FOR translation, at least not strategically so. There is no need here to identify the author or others involved in the preparation of the text, or even the text itself. In the end the result has been, I hope, the best result possible.
But it does raise an important question. We are an international body; we pride ourselves on being so and believe that it is part of our charism to be so. Of fairly recent times we have been clear that international communities are an important witness value in a world beset by nationalistic tendencies and other lack of ‘communion’. That being the case, is it worth asking the question: does this fact of writing and preparing for an international readership actually have consequences for the way someone writes and prepares a text? I am presuming that the answer is yes, and that it involves some conscious strategies.
In other words, I am switching the focus away from what is expected of the translator to what is expected of those who offer texts for translation.
And when I think about it, having already forwarded the ‘Translating the charism’ document to the Vicar of the Rector Major (who has responded enthusiastically to it, clearly having read it from end to end) I now realise that this aspect was something we overlooked. This expectation should have been included in that document. Translating the charism also has something to do with how the text to be translated is written in the first place, and how it is presented for the purposes of translation.
The difficulties I ran into had more to do with the latter, perhaps (how the text was presented for translation), but it also involved certain assumptions that turned out not to be true. For example, an assumption was made that an important section of the text was already available in English to readers, but the reality was different. It would appear that this (admittedly important) ‘English’ text had never been been formally translated, or at least had never been available in print. Diligent searches of archives, including the Central Salesian Archives, could not find it. And obviously, from the translator’s perspective, these kinds of searches take up a lot of time and energy. Even simple things like quoting from the Memorie Biografiche can be problematic, especially if they are documents, because the English BM often condenses such or has a footnote that reads “We are omitting at this point a letter of Don Bosco to X about some business matters and other unimportant correspondence to and from Don Bosco. [Editor]”. They may have been unimportant to the editor at the time, but may be important in a different time and context. And remember, a translator must check every quotation in a text to ensure an accurate translation where possible. Necessary but time-consuming.
Many of the other difficulties were ‘presentation’ issues. Examples of this kind of thing are:
- Many changes of font and font features with no apparent reason for some of these. Of course, a CAT tool is not affected by that, but it slows down the proofing stage of a translation which is post-CAT tool activity;
- The choice to copy-paste large swathes of text from another original, which introduces differences in style, both rhetorically and orthographically;
- Lots of emphasis, by which I mean the regular use of bold, italics and bold-italics, quotation marks and even underlining (normally frowned upon these days). Again, this does not bother a CAT tool, but one might ask if this particular kind of emphasis works the same way in every culture. I would suggest it does not work well in English, where good writing tries to minimise this kind of emphasis and instead use literary devices: word order, cleft sentences, use of auxiliaries like ‘do’ (did), or whatever other features of the kind the language offers us.
- Footnotes set up per page rather than per document, meaning that the footnotes begin with '1' on each new page. But consider: if the text goes to print, it will not be on an A4 page, so numbers per page will be different, and also consider that different languages say the same thing in either more, or fewer words, which will also affect per-page numbering. The best choice, surely, is to run footnotes sequentially either by section or by whole document.
- Then there is the question of a mixture of styles, e.g. for section numbering. That means that some numbers might be without a stop after them, while others will have a stop after them, depending on which style was used.
- And then there are typos. Some are obvious, but the less obvious ones mean a translator loses time, thinking that it is something in the language that he or she is unaware of, and only after some time realising that it is in fact a typo.
So the Best Practice this time is obvious! How we can help people who write Salesian texts for a worldwide readership to write and prepare them better.
best_practice_42-writing-for-translation.docx