Breaking the Golden Rule of Translation
Translators must translate from their acquired language into their native language. So says the consensus, it would seem. And I couldn’t agree more. Rare is the human who can master a foreign language so well that his prose flows like a native. I have tried it myself. So confident in my French, that is, until my translation attempts bleed red ink at the hands of a native speaker. The American Translators Association, on Slide 16 of its excellent guide, Translation: getting it right, agrees.
Unfortunately this idealistic notion does not hold up under the law of supply and demand. A quick search of ATA’s Korean-to-English translators, for example, reveals only 8 of 73 translators whose native language is English. Sixty-three are Korean natives, one is French, and one is Polish.
And the same holds for other language pairs too. The clear fact is that many native English speakers have studied a Romance language, or German, or Japanese, or even Russian, but how common is the mother-tongue American who acquires a nuanced understanding of Czech and then enters the translation profession? Eight out of 43 to be exact according to the ATA, meaning somewhat better odds than Korean. And we have to assume that there is enough work to keep these “wrong-directioners” busy.
In fact suggesting that non-native speakers of the target language “need not apply” seems as unrealistic as a butcher who in a country with food rationing recommends only grass-fed beef when his shop hasn’t seen beef — grass-fed or otherwise — for ages
Now, you break this golden rule at your own peril, or at least at the risk of working harder. At times, though, not only do you have no choice, but it may be your best bet. A non-native speaker starts with an idiomatic hand tied behind his back, true, but he may also possess a greater understanding of the topic he’s translating. And this cannot be discounted. We’ve all encountered the Russian Biochemistry Ph.D. or retired Danish engineer who after 30 years in the States still can’t sort out his English prepositions, yet his competence in his field is unmatched among translators.
My opinion: choose a native speaker of the target language when you can and when he’s right for the job. If you can’t, your process is more complicated: a native speaking editor must be added to the equation to review and verify the wording with the translator each step of the way. The grasp of the source document is assured by the native fluency of the translator — which is not always true under the opposite scenario — and now the challenge is the idiomatic flow of the translation. In fact a symbiotic translator/editor team of this sort, à la Pevear and Volokhonsky, may achieve the ultimate results.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Genia A. // Apr 17, 2008 at 1:06 am
Couldn’t agree more to what you are saying in this post. In this part (and it’s a rather wast part) of the globe we’re still struggling to get editors whose native language would be English… And our clients are not prepared to pay for high quality translation, checked and edited. I’ll be writing an article to a business magazine on how to get quality translation and will emphasize the necessity of teams of translators and editors!
2 Glenn // Apr 17, 2008 at 7:56 am
Genia,
Thanks so much for your comment. Budgets here don’t always allow for the treatment I mention either. Nor do timeframes.
But there are some non-native speakers of English who make only very tiny mistakes in English, and an editor can smooth out the prose. For that matter, many native speakers still retain the expressions and syntax of the original, especially on the first draft.
Others non-native speakers are more problematic and should not translate into their foreign tongue because their errors are too significant and we can’t edit their work with any reliable outcome.
3 David Russi // Apr 22, 2008 at 5:57 am
While the golden rule is valid in many ways, it is not without its pitfalls. Fact is that unfortunately a translator working into his/her own mother tongue does always have the command of the source language to translate it properly, and ofter misunderstands the source text. As one of those notable exceptions to the rule, after many years of editing native-speaker translations I have come to the conclusion that 3/4 of the translations mistakes I see are due to lack of understanding of the original. So, would it not be better, I say, to have a qualified translator who is near-native in the target language and native in the source language, and then have a native speaker edit the product? Anyway, mother tongue is hard to evaluate… for me, for example, English is a second language, and I actually translate into my third, Spanish.
4 Glenn // Apr 22, 2008 at 9:20 am
David, thank you for the comment.
I agree, many errors occur because a translator misunderstands the source. I’ve always viewed translation as two steps: the first, getting the meaning out of one language, the second, getting it into another langauge.
Obviously, these two steps somehow meld in the translator’s brain in the act we call translation — and the best translators seem to do this flawlessly — but there are sometimes residual problems if the person has difficulty in either language. Hence the solution you mention of having a mother-tongue editor finalize the process.
I find that even many translators going into their native language retain the syntax of the source, especially if they have not properly re-read their translation. So we still need to edit the product.
For that matter, I often see editing as two steps, too: one to verify accuracy, the other to ensure proper writing in the target.
By the way, no trace whatsoever that English is not your first language!
Thanks again.
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