Translation

For other uses, see Translation (disambiguation).

Translation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language — the source text — and the production of another, equivalent text in another language — the target text.

Traditionally, translation has always been a human activity, although attempts have been made to automate and computerize the translation of natural language texts, machine translation, or to use computers as an aid to translation, computer-assisted translation. See the section entitled Trends in translation below for more information.

Although for much of its history translation has dealt primarily with "written" texts, and nowadays still does, translation may also be done from audio input to audio output, from visual input to visual output or from audio to visual or vice versa. These forms of translation operate differently.

The goal of translation is to establish a relationship of equivalence between the source and the target texts (that is to say, both texts communicate the same message), while taking into account the various constraints placed on the translator. (These constraints include context, the rules of grammar of the source language, its writing conventions, its idioms and the like.)

The term translation is also used for the product of this procedure.

Translation is also the name given to a profession which consists of transferring ideas expressed in writing from one language to another.

Translation vs. interpreting

A distinction is made between translation, which consists of transferring ideas expressed in writing from one language to another, from interpreting, which consists of transferring ideas expressed orally, or by the use of gestures (as in the case of sign language), from one language to another.

Although interpreting can be considered a subcategory of translation from the point of view of analyzing the processes involved (translation studies), in practice the talents required for these two activities are quite different.

Translation process

The translation process, whether for translation per se or for interpreting, can be stated simply as:

1. Decoding the meaning of the source text, and
2. Re-encoding this meaning in the target language.

To identify and capture the meaning of a text the translator must identify its component "translation units", that is to say the segments of the text (which may be a word, a phrase, one or more sentences, to be treated as a cognitive unit.

Behind this simple procedure there lies a complex cognitive operation. For example, to decode the meaning of the source text in its entirety, the translator proceeds more or less consciously and methodically to interpret and analyse all the features of the text, a process which requires in-depth knowledge of both the grammar, semantics, syntax, idioms and the like of the source language, as well as the culture of its speakers.

The translator needs the same in-depth knowledge to re-encode the meaning in the target language. In fact, many sources maintain that the translator's knowledge of the target language is more important, and needs to be deeper, than his knowledge of the source language. For this reason, most translators translate into a language of which they are native speakers.

In addition, knowledge of the subject matter being discussed is essential.

In recent years studies in cognitive linguistics have been able to provide valuable insights into the cognitive process of translation.

Measuring success in translation

As the goal of translation is to establish a relationship of equivalence between the source and the target texts (that is to say, both texts communicate the same message), while taking into account the various constraints placed on the translator, a successful translation can be judged by how well it meets these two criteria:

1. Faithfulness, also called fidelity, that is the extent to which the translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to it or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning; and
2. Transparency, that is the extent to which the translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.

A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion is said to be an "idiomatic translation".

The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social context, its historical context, etc.

The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds" wrong, and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine translation systems, often result in patent nonsense.

Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may knowingly strive to produce a literal translation. For example, literary translators and translators of religious works often attempt to retain the model of the source text as much as possible. To do this they deliberately "stretch" the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language to provide "local colour" in the translation.

The concepts of faithfulness and transparency are looked at differently in recent translation theories. Fidelity, with its inherent notion of sexual loyalty, is contested not only for being gender blind, but also for prioritizing the so called "original" over the translation. The theory that translation can be as creative and original as the source text is gaining momentum. This theory helps the translators to get rid of the sense of guilt that accompanies in trying to be a bit creative or original.

The critique of these two concepts is also aided by the translation practices in non-western countries like India. The Indian epic Ramayana has numerous versions in many Indian languages and the stories in each are different from one another. If one looks into the words used for translation in Indian (either Aryan or Dravidian) languages, the freedom given to the translators is evident.

Translation problems

The translator can face many problems when tackling a text. These include:

• The source text not being in electronic form
• The source text not being the final text, and being redrafting during the translation process
• Illegible text
• Misspelt text
• Incomplete text
• Dialectalisms and neologisms
• Unexplained acronyms and abbreviations
• Unreasonably obscure jargon
• Clumsy or incomprehensible wording
• Cultural references that will mean nothing to the target audience
• Absent images from text intended to be accompanied by them (e.g. the translator is to translate captions to photos but not supplied with these photos)

These problems are mainly the fault of the client failing to provide the translator with all that is needed.

However, texts may also be difficult to translate simply due to tricky words and turns of phrase. There is some debate around words felt to be inherently hard to translate. For example, Today Translations, a British translation company, surveyed 1,000 linguists and claimed the Bantu word "ilunga" as the most difficult non-English word to translate into English in June 2004. The word allegedly means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time"; however it later transpired that "Ilunga" is a personal name, with no evidence for its use as a common noun.

Their list of difficult words is typical of the sorts of words that are often held to be hard to translate. Leaving aside that at the existence of least two of the terms is contested, they are all rather easy to translate. The lists includes saudade, a Portuguese word (also used in Spanish) very frequently given as an example of a hard word to translate. It translates quite neatly as "sorrowful longing". Some are only hard to translate if we want to stick to the same grammatical category. For example, it is hard to find a noun corresponding to the Russian почемучка (pochemuchka) or the Yiddish שלימזל (shlimazl), but the adjectives "inquisitive" and "jinxed" correspond just fine.

The words that are truly the hardest to translate are the most common in the language. Consider the verb "to "get" in the following sentences:

• "I've not got much money" ("have")
• "Go and get a job" ("find", "obtain")
• "Go and get some groceries" ("fetch", "buy")
• "They got the thief" ("catch", "capture")
• "Through his campaigning he got elected" ("manage to be", passive voice)
• "They got killed" ("be [against one's will]", passive voice)
• "I get it" ("understand")
• "Get up!" ("arise", "stand")
• "Get down" ("boogie", "descend")
• "Get back" ("return", "achieve vengence")
• "Get through" ("survive", "cope emotionally")
• "Have you got my letter?" ("receive")
• etc, etc.

Each of these would require a totally different translation in most languages. The same is true for most apparently simple, common words, such as "go", "come", "the", "there", "want", etc.

Consider also the example of a word like "bread". At first glance, it is a very simple word, referring in everyday use to just one thing, with obvious translations into other languages. But ask people from England, France and China to describe or draw "bread", du pain and 包 (bāo), and you will achieve quite different results. How long is it? How crunchy? Is it sweet? Does it come sliced? Where do you get it? They will be envisioning completely different things.

The problem often lies in failure to disinguish between translation and glossing. The latter is what a glossary does: give a short (usually one-word) equivalent for each term. The former, as explained above, is the decoding of meaning and intent at the text level (not the word level or even sentence level) and then the re-encoding of these findings in a target language. Words like saudade and שלימזל are hard to gloss into a single other word, but given two or more words they can be perfectly adequately translated. "Bread" has a better claim to being untranslatable, since even if we resort to saying "French bread", "Chinese bread", "Algerian bread", etc. we are relying on our audience knowing what these are like.

Differing levels of precision also play a role. What does "there" mean? Even discounting idiomatic uses such as "there, there, don't cry", we can be confronted by several possibilities. If something is "there" but not very far away, a Spaniard will say ahí; if it is further away he or she will say allí, unless there are connotations of "near there", "over yonder" or "on that side", in which case the word is likely to be allá. Conversely, in colloquial French, all three "there" concepts plus the concept of "here" all tend to be expressed with the word là. So where is the thing?

Linguists are naturally enthusiastic about obscure words with local flavour, and are wont to declare them "untranslatable", but in reality these incredibly culture-laden terms are the easiest of all to translate, even more so than universal concepts such as "mother". This is because it is standard practice to translate these words by the same word in the other language, importing it for the first time if necessary. For example, a translator working on an English version of a menu in a French restaurant would generally be considered to err if he or she translated pâté de foie gras as something like "inflamed liver paste", although this is a good description. Instead, the accepted translation is simply pâté de foie gras, or at most foie gras pâté. In some cases, only transcription is required: Japanese わさび translates into English as wasabi. A short description or parallel with a familar concept is also often acceptable: わさび may also be translated as "Japanese horseradish" or "Japanese mustard".

The more incredibly obscure and specific to a culture the term is, the simpler it is to translate. For example, the name of an insignificant settlement such as Euroa in Australia is automatically just "Euroa" in every language in the world that uses the Roman alphabet, whilst it takes some knowledge to be aware that Saragossa is Zaragoza, Saragosse, etc. or that China is 中国, Cina, Chine, etc.

Specialized types of translation

Any type of written text can be a candidate for translation, however, the translation industry is often categorized by a number of specializations. Each of these specializations has its own challenges and difficulties. An incomplete list of these specializations includes:

Administrative translation

The translation of administrative texts.

Commercial translation

translation of commercial (business) texts.

Computer translation

The translation of computer programs and related documents (manuals, help files, web sites.)

The notion of localization, that is the adaptation of the translation to the target language and culture, is gaining prevalence in this area of specialization.

Economic translation

The translation of texts in the fields of economics.

Financial translation

The translation of texts of a financial nature.

General translation

The translation of "general" texts. In practice, few texts are really "general"; most fall into a specialization but are not seen as such.

Legal translation

The translation of legal documents (laws, contracts, treaties, etc.).

A skilled legal translator is normally as adept at the law (often with in-depth legal training) as with translation, since inaccuracies in legal translations can have serious results.

(One example of problematic translation is the Treaty of Waitangi, where the English and Maori versions differ in certain important areas.)

Sometimes, to prevent such problems, one language will be declared authoritative, with the translations not being considered legally binding, although in many cases this is not possible, as one party does not want to be seen as subservient to the other.

Literary translation

The translation of literary works (novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.)

If the translation of non-literary works is regarded as a skill, the translation of fiction and poetry is much more of an art. Some writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, have made a name for themselves as literary translators per se.

Many consider some forms of poetry to be almost impossible to translate accurately, given the difficulty in rendering both the form and the content in the target language.

This question was expertly explored, and a mostly positive answer given, in Douglas Hofstadter's 1997 book, Le Ton beau de Marot. A proposal has been made regarding how Wikipedia can have an effect on translating poetry.

Medical translation

The translation of works of a medical nature.

Like pharmaceutical translation, medical translation is specialization where a mistranslation can have grave consequences.

Pedagogical translation

Translation practiced as a means of learning a second language.

Pedagogical translation is used to enrich (and to assess) the student's vocabulary in the second language, to help assimilate new syntactic structures and to verify the student's understanding. Unlike other types of translation, pedagogical translation takes place in the student's native language (or dominant language) and the second language. That is to say that the student will translate both to and from the second language. Another difference between this mode of translation and other modes is that the goal is often literal translation of phrases taken out of context, and of text fragments, which may be completed fabricated for the purposes of the exercise.

Pedagogical translation should not be confused with scholarly translation.

Pharmaceutical translation

The translation of works in the medpharmaceutical industry.

Like medical translation, pharmaceutical translation is specialization where a mistranslation can have grave consequences.

Scientific translation

The translation of scientific texts.

Scholarly translation

The translation of specialized texts written in an academic environment.

Scholarly translation should not be confused with pedagogical translation.

Technical translation

The translation of technical texts (manuals, instructions, etc.)

History

Translation of religious texts

The translation of religious works has played an important role in world history. For instance the Buddhist monks who translated the Indian sutras into the Chinese language would often skew the translation to better adapt to China's very different culture. Thus notions such as filial piety were stressed.

The translation of the Christian Bible has long been of great import.

St. Jerome, the patron saint of translation, is still considered one of the greatest translators in history for his work on translating the Bible into Latin. This translation was used by the Catholic Church for centuries, but even his translation met much controversy when it was released.

The Protestant Reformation saw the translation of the Bible into the local languages of Europe, an act condemned by the Catholic Church and one that had a great impact on the split between Protestantism and Catholicism.

Martin Luther's Bible in German and the King James Bible in English had immense impacts on the religion, culture, and language of those countries.

See also: Bible translations

Trends in translation

Machine translation

Machine translation (MT) is a form of translation where a computer program analyses the source text and produces a target text without human intervention.

Currently the state of machine translation is such that it involves some human intervention, as it requires a pre-editing and a post-editing phase. Note that in machine translation, the translator supports the machine.

In recent years the long anticipated goal of machines assisting in the translation process has met with limited success. The goal of converting information from one language to another automatically is a major goal of natural language processing.

The internet has been a testing ground for these technologies, such as Alta Vista's Babel Fish. These tools produce what is called a "gisting translation" — a rough translation that gives the "gist" of the source text, but is not otherwise usable.

However, in fields with highly limited ranges of vocabulary and simple sentence structure, for example weather reports, machine translation can deliver useful results.

Computer-assisted translation

Computer-assisted translation (CAT), also called machine-assisted translation (MAT), is a form of translation where a human translator creates a target text with the assistance of a computer program. Note that in computer-assisted translation, the machine supports the translator.

Computer-assisted translation can be seen to include standard dictionary and grammar software, however, the term is normally used to refer to a range of specialized programs available for the translator.

For example, translation memory (TM) programs store and align previously translated source texts and their equivalent target texts in a database. When a new source text is submitted, the translation memory program scans it for previous translations, which are then proposed to the translator for re-use.

Cultural translation

This is a new area of interest in the field of translation studies. Cultural translation is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture. The concept uses linguisiitc translation as a tool or metaphor in analysing the nature of transformation in cultures. For example, ethnography is considered a translated narrative of an abstract living culture.

See also

• Computer-assisted translation
• Cultural identity
• Dubbing
• Fan translation
• Legal translation
• List of translators
• Machine translation
• Subtitling
• Terminology
• Translation theory:
  • Walter Benjamin
  • Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• Untranslatability

References

• Nimrod's Sin: Treason and Translation in a Multilingual World edited by Norman Simms (1983).
• Translation: agent of communication guest-edited by Marilyn Gaddis Rose (a special issue of Pacific Moana Quarterly, 5:1) (1980).
• Translation Review.
• Towards a Theory of Constraints in Translation by Ali Darwish (www.at-turjuman.com) (1999).

External links

• List of internet translators
• The Altavista Babelfish, online machine translation software
• Google language tools
• Internet Language Translation -- English, French, German, Danish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech & Italian
• Open Source translation tools for South African languages
• Translation Journal
• On the Relative (Un)translatability of Puns
• ProZ.com — The Translation Workplace
• Translation Dictionaries
• Online dictionary of English and 7 other European and Asian languages
• Wikipedia Translation — project to aid translation of articles in foreign Wikipedias into English. Sign up at Wikipedia:Translators available, or view a list of pending translations at Wikipedia:Translation into English.
• Translation Services — A portal for translators and people looking for resources in translation.