Over at the Intralingo blog,
Lisa Carter is very diplomatically sparring with one reader who relentlessly insists
that he cranks out 10,000 publication-ready words a day on a regular basis. (“I’ve
often translated well in excess of 10,000 words a day, and
working overtime (
sic) I’ve
translated up to 18,000 words (
sic!) over
a 15 hour period (
sick, yo!), and I
would rate my quality as high, if not higher, than my contemporaries (
contemporaries?).”) Lisa is very
tactfully brandishing argument after argument that this is not possible, but
our man, undeterred, blithely charges back after every rebuff. Bless her heart, she is soooooo
polite. I, on the other hand, (for good or ill) was not bequeathed the gift of suffering
fools lightly. Ms. Carter is wasting her time, though. Let’s face it, there
simply isn’t a polite way to, you know, tell someone to his face that he is a
hack.
Appreciation for language is hard to teach if your student simply
doesn’t have it. It is a sense. Just like you cannot explain to a blind person
what makes one of Monet’s water lilies special, Lisa cannot raise her voice
sufficiently and explain to our 18,000-word-per-day Wunderkind that his output
is most assuredly a stomach-churning bucket of bat guano. Even tone-deaf people
who talk about translation but have never translated a single word in their
lives are smart enough to sidestep the “literary” argument quickly. So they
just, Sheldon-Cooper-like, bracket literature in a special mental category (“stuff
that other people care a lot about—for some unfathomable reason—but I don’t”)
and blissfully go about their business because literature isn’t applicable to
commercial translation. “Ah, but that is literature,” the McLocalization
theorist ruminates with a knowing smile, “I have heard of it, hmmm, yes…
Wikipedia tells me it is something from back in the Age of the Codex. But I am
here to discuss repetitive technical texts…”
The literary/non-literary dichotomy is not that ancient. As
is the case of a lot of stupid stuff (nationalism, Mesmerism, Gothic novels),
it only dates back to the Romantics. It is slowly being placed into
question by the genre-disrupting culture of the present. Think about Ali G and
reality TV, and then try to retain the old comforting distinctions of fact and
fiction snugly in your head. The idea that we bring a set of conventions (the
phrase “suspension of disbelief” was coined by Wordsworth) to one set of texts
and another—completely different—set of decoding tools to non-fiction simply
does not resist serious critical scrutiny. Does that mean that Ben Bernanke’s
press conferences should be rendered by the financial translator with the same
appreciation for the mot juste that Lisa
Carter lavishes on her novels? Well, yes and no. “Yes” in the sense that you
should weigh every word carefully (because every central banker does and their
words can cause a lot of devastation) and “no” in the sense that you shouldn’t
waste too much time waiting for the right adverb to strike you like the Pacific
struck Keats’s “stout Cortez.” Because, aside from being slightly foolish, it will
get you fired in the end.
Of course, the idea that a “translator is a writer” sounds hyper-pretentious
if you think capital “W” Writer: a Luther-throwing-the-inkpot-at-the-Devil
Writer, or a Flaubert-spending-eighteen-years-working-on-Madame-Bovary Writer. But small caps “w” writer in the sense that
you write. And you should try to do it as well as you can in the service of the
original author, who may or may not be a capital “W” Writer, but nonetheless
deserves a hearing (or at least is paying for it).
I was reminded of that recently while reading Bruce Catton’s
trilogy on the Army of the Potomac (
translators should be keen
readers). While Catton’s books are not really works of academic
history, they do provide a lot of technical details on military affairs, from
the movement of armies during campaigns to minutiae such as the types of weapons
used and just what the heck hardtack actually was. But his works are also quite
opaque as texts. The influence of William Faulkner is felt on every page, even
though it is a very Northern book—an attempt to write Yankee history. The jumps
forward and backward in time are also unimaginable without the precedent of
literary Modernism. One small example. When Catton is describing the sequence
of the Second Battle of Manassas/Bull Run, the 12
th Massachusetts regiment
is left facing a colossal flanking movement from the Confederates. The author abruptly
breaks off for one entire page, in the middle of the battle, to tell the story
of the regiment. Its members were responsible for writing the marching song
John Brown’s Body, dedicated to the
abolitionist guerrilla whose raid on Harper’s Ferry partly triggered the
Civil War ( “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave/ And we go
matching on!”). This song was the source for Julia Ward Howe’s
Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is
still a staple of American military marching bands (and tactfully suppresses references to rotting corpses). That takes Catton a page
and a half. After such as lengthy digression, Catton equally abruptly returns
to the two tiny brigades facing a Rebel onslaught:
But the dandy 12th
was a long way from the ladies of Boston now, and Colonel Webster was killed,
and the 12th was finally forced back, along with the rest of
Ricketts’s men and the Germans. (p.40)
You see what the author did there? Try rewriting that
sentence according to the rules of “proper” grammar (leaving aside the fact
that he started a paragraph with a negative conjunction, a huge no-no according
to the provincial school marms who teach “proper” English):
However, the dandy 12th
was a long way from the ladies of Boston. Colonel Webster was (had been?)
killed. The regiment (Note: the reiteration of the name probably wouldn't pass muster with most proofreaders) was finally forced back, along with the rest of
Ricketts’s men and the Germans.
Blink and you miss it. Try to translate this sentence
without trying to recreate the confusion and terror of the Massachusetts
soldiers and you might as well translate
18,000 words a day.
But perhaps that is a rare case of non-fiction that is
suffused with literary technique. After all, the Civil War as a historical
subject has always been more the preserve of belles lettres because of Whitman, Sandburg and Faulkner. The
lyrical undertone to a lot of writing on the conflict stretches all the way to
the present, as anyone who has seen Ken Burns’s documentaries on the conflict
will easily perceive.
So how about a less high-falutin’ example? This is an example
of something I come across very often (the highlight is mine):
After Papandreou's
election win, Mršnik wrote, in a confidential letter to Standard & Poor's
customers, that in light of the repeated budgetary lapses of the various Greek
governments, it remained to be seen whether the new administration had the will
to implement a credible budget strategy. This
sounded diplomatic, but it was pure sarcasm. Investors got the message, namely that the decline of Greek bonds
from secure investments to casino chips was accelerating.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,790333-2,00.html
In a lot of financial research, what you put down on paper
is purposefully bland, because some day you may have to answer to a wider
audience (or an angry politician or, gulp, a judge) for anything that is more
controversial than a spiceless platitude. That is why you have to be attuned to
the sarcasm. Once again, blink and you miss it. Mršnik was trading a “nudge,
nudge, wink, wink” moment with his readers. His real opinion was reserved for
the very privileged clients who get him on the telephone or the board room, as
any good analyst’s opinion should be. That is why inexperienced translators
often chuckle and say: “Wait, is he serious?” Duh! Of course not! The unspoken byword
here is “ldl,” which is what investment bankers write for “let’s discuss live” (i.e.,
where no written or taped evidence is left).
Every single sentence contains dozens of tiny little
decisions. If you translate 18,000 words a day, that means you make over 100,000
tiny decisions in a single day. But that is no problem because you are working on a non-literary, repetitive text, right? We can just hope that none of your tiny decisions is dangerous.
Or the subject of future litigation.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish
into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and
investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US
Government's Open Source Center, several small-and-medium-sized brokerages,
asset management institutions based in Spain, and H.B.O. International. To
contact him, visit his website and write to the address
listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network or follow him on Twitter.
