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Tag Archives: translation

Translator, interpreter…tom-ay-toe, tom-ah-toe

There’s nothing more likely to get my professional hackles raised than hearing some clueless news reporter saying something like “Speaking through a translator, Mr. Smith gave a press conference…”. Apart from the obvious practical considerations of how you hold a translator up to your mouth and where do you speak through, it galls me to hear people over and over again refer to translators as interpreters, and vice versa.

And it’s nearly always television and radio reporters who are the culprits. Our fellow wordsmiths in the newspapers generally get it right, thankfully. But it is surprising that people have such difficulty in grasping the difference between a translator – someone who takes stuff from one language and writes it down – and an interpreter – someone who takes stuff from another language and speaks it. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with interpreters at all and am in awe of conference interpreters (except for one nameless interpreter in Dublin who spoke about “research machines” when the French speaker was talking about “search engines”). It’s just that translating and interpreting are two very separate jobs which require different skills and qualities. It’s like the difference between pirates and ninjas, apples and pears, cornflakes and rice crispies… they’re similar but very different.

Priates vs. Ninjas (Source: Geeklogie.com)

Pirates vs. Ninjas (Source: Geeklogie.com)

Perhaps it’s merely a symptom of a wider ignorance among the general public of what it is language professionals in all of their flavours actually do. Maybe it’s a wake-up call for the translating and interpreting communities to raise awareness… then again, maybe it’s only me that’s bothered by this in which case, never mind!

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An easy target for cash-strapped universities

A recent article by Melanie Newman in The Times Higher Education makes for grim reading about the state of higher education in the UK. The article reveals a raft of job losses, voluntary redundancies and recruitment freezes at four more institutions which is causing alarm among staff. Nothing new you might say. Indeed this is pretty much par for the course across the university sector but one particular example, if it is true, is especially worrying. Newman writes that the Centre for Translational and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick is set to close following an internal university review. With Susan Bassnett, who heads up the centre, approaching retirement and the failure to find a replacement for her, it looks quite certain that the centre will be shut down, although no final decision will be made until July of this year. The article quotes an unnamed academic who says that student recruitment for MA programmes hosted by the centre has been halted.

Unions are blaming this development on the university’s preoccupation with money from research funding, or in the case of the centre, the lack of it. It seems that the way in which universities’, with their current business model, evaluate the usefulness or, regrettably, the profitability of various disciplines whereby huge value is placed on external research funding is not only inequitable but downright inappropriate. Sure, a department offering translation and languages , for example, may not capture massive research grants but it will attract students to the university and this brings in money. Possibly a lot more than any research grant. By offering translation programmes we create additional demand for languages at an institution and this serves to reinforce the system.

All of this begs the question of whether Translation Studies (and languages in general) is seen as financial deadwood by universities. Is it an easy target for university bean counters looking to shave a few zeroes off university expenditure? The move to close the translation section at Warwick could be regarded as a opportunistic cost-cutting exercise but more cynical souls could be forgiven for wondering whether universities see translation and languages as nice to have, but not, strictly speaking, necessary; an expense that doesn’t return on the investment. The argument that researchers need to pull in external funding is one with which all academics are familiar but we all know that the humanities and languages in particular are never likely to attract the same level of funding that the biosciences and engineering disciplines seem to do so effortlessly. There simply isn’t the same pool of money to drawn from so when you look at funding revenue you’re not comparing like with like.

Money matters aside, it is unthinkable that a university could conceive of jettisoning languages and translation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to propose some form of soft-minded, woolly, right-on, touchy-feely model of education where we defend and indulge useless academics who can’t get a job in the real world and allow them to research and teach ridiculously obscure and – let’s be honest here – pointless topics like the effects of wallpaper on the linguistic and cultural identities of bilingual Russian hedgehogs between 18-27 August 1892 (incidentally, if this is your research area, shame on you, wasting all of that precious research funding!). It’s just that some subjects which need to be taught have an intrinsic value for a country and an economy which is less obvious and which cannot be measured solely in terms of grant capture. Translation Studies is one of these subject areas but the lack of high levels of visible revenue in comparison with other disciplines shouldn’t be seen as evidence of a discipline which isn’t pulling its weight and it certainly shouldn’t be used as an excuse for questioning its continued existence. Let’s just hope that the Warwick case is just an isolated case of financial opportunism.

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Are translators too reliant on the Internet?

I had a strangely unsettling experience over the weekend which has left me a little concerned for the future of translation and possibly even the world as we know it.  OK, maybe not the world, just translation. What happened? I couldn’t access the Internet! Yep, my ISP decided that the day I started on a large medical translation was the day they would shut down half of their network for “essential maintenance”. Typical!

A drug-eluting coronary stent

A drug-eluting coronary stent

So there I was, ready to start working on a medical text (on coronary stents and aortic aneurysms no less) and about to do my usual ritual of spending some time scanning the web for parallel texts and clarifying the meanings of unusual terms, but not this time. After the initial indignation bordering on rage at the fact that I couldn’t get online, this indignation gave way to unease. What if there was term I didn’t know? How would I find out how to translate it?  Now I have dozens of general and specialised dictionaries at hand and over 12 years experience as a translator so there really wasn’t anything to worry about but not having Internet access, and more specifically no Google, knocked me sideways and it took me a good half hour to regain my composure.

Google has helped reinforce my belief that translators shouldn’t put too much faith in dictionaries because they are often out of date and won’t tell you which of the various synonyms is correct. On top of that they rarely tell you how to use a particular word; the style and general language usage of certain genres of texts often being every bit as important as the specialised terms they contain. (I have to confess that I have been known on occasion to advise students to forget about paper dictionaries and use Google instead because parallel texts in particular are the only way to go when translating.) But Google has also made researching subjects much faster – or at least it seems that way. You mightn’t really find the answer any sooner but you’ll plough through a lot more material looking for it in the same time. I think I’ve gotten used to the fact that with access to Google, you can find the answer to any question providing you know how to search and more importantly, how to separate the wheat from the chaff in search results and you can do this much more quickly than nipping down to the local public library. There’s also a certain reassurance that comes from simply knowing it’s there.

This begs the question of whether we (I’m assuming it’s not just me who’s been affected by this) have become too dependent on the Internet. Yes it’s amazingly useful and fast, and yes it helps us to access enormous amounts of resources but what would happen to us as translators if we woke up one morning in an apocalyptic post-Internet age where Luddites danced through the streets rejoicing at the fact that there was no Internet and no search engines, iPhones, netbooks or online databases? Would we have become so reliant on the Internet that we would have forgotten how to do translation the old-fashioned way (”acoustic translation” for want of a better term – ok that’s probably not as funny as it sounds in my head). Would the quality of translations suddenly plummet? Would translators simply sit there, bewildered and at a complete loss as to where they should start?

Or am I just getting my undergarments knotted over nothing? Is lamenting the good old days when translators used pens and paper and the occasional carrier pigeon and never resorted to such demon-possessed trickery as the interweb the same as yearning for the “make-do” days when people could darn socks, use an abacus or wash half a dozen kids with one bathful of water? Useful skills maybe but, let’s be honest, not particularly desirable or likely ever to come back into fashion. Was translation “purer”, more honest and more difficult back then? Who knows?

As for my translation, I finished it on time and my subject knowledge of the area and old-fashioned paper dictionaries came through in the end… it just took a little longer to get started.

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Education at the speed of light (almost)… the Microlecture

Ferdinand von Prondzynsky (President of Dublin City University) recently posted an interesting article about a new phenomenon in education called the “microlecture”. Essentially a microlecture is a 60 second blast of information, delivered as a video or audio podcast. Now while Ferdinand, a man I have great respect for, was careful not to be instantly dismissive of what could be argued to be a daft new fad thought up by touchy feely educationalists eager to squander, I mean capture, more research funding he did point out that such an approach essentially eliminates some of the most important aspects of education: analysis, discussion and criticality. In this sense there is definitely a point to be made – most educational traditions eschew the rote learning approach in favour of students who can analyse, assess and create knowledge rather than mindlessly accept everything that is fed to them.

To put this in perspective I should probably explain a little bit about how microlectures work. Developed by David Penrose, the self-styled “One Minute Professor” microlectures involve stripping all of the unnecessary “padding” from a typical lecture and reducing it to a burst of keywords and phrases which are topped and tailed by roughly 30 seconds of introduction and conclusion. Lasting between 60 seconds to 3 minutes Penrose argues in an interview published on Chronicle.com that the format is a “framework for knowledge excavation” where “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.” To some this might sound like a polite way of saying that lecturers get to put their feet up while the students do all the work (although others might ask whether this is a bad thing at all).

But anyway, let’s go back and address that niggling feeling which most of us probably have that microlecturing amounts to a dumbing down of education (a) because of the fact that a gimmicky 60 seconds is nowhere near long enough to impart all of the essential information and (b) there is no time or place for discussion, analysis or criticality. There probably is some mileage in the idea that the microlecture is not for everyone and most certainly not for every subject. At first glance it does seem more suited to technical or practical subjects than to certain theoretical subjects where analysis is essential.

Having said that, it is a possibility that it’s not the format or indeed its incompatibility with certain subjects that’s the problem. It could just be the course design and the sequencing of topics and classes within a course. In other words it might all boil down to the teachers themselves. I can see a clear use for microlectures as a primer for a particular topic. Imagine a microlecture outlining the key concepts in an area, say legal translation or usability issues in website design. Students are blasted with a bite-size overview of the topic and then told to build on it in preparation for a conventional lecture, tutorial or workshop in a week or two. This would, I imagine, usher students into a learning style where they create their own knowledge, they direct their own learning… already buzzwords like constructivism, inquiry-based learning, transferable skills and information literacy are circling overhead like flies. And this, I think, might be the hidden value of microlectures. It’s not what they contain, it’s how they can be used. As a primer or starting point, the microlecture can represent a scaffold (constructivist slang for “a hook to hang your coat on”) upon which students can build knowledge as they explore and learn about a subject. I’m not sure whether it will work – I think there are various pedagogical, organisational and cultural issues to be tackled – and only time will tell whether this is a genuine advance in learning or just another woolly attempt to pander to what some would call the Facebook generation with their ever-decreasing attention spans.

For more information about the microlecture format, take a look at the following:

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Caveat Translator: Understanding the Legal Consequences of Errors in Professional Translation

Byrne, Jody (2007) Caveat Translator: Understanding the Legal Consequences of Errors in Professional Translation. Journal of Specialised Translation, 2007 (7) pp.2-24

At the very heart of translation studies is the issue of translation quality. Yet, while there are numerous methods for assessing the quality of translations, little is known about what happens when a translator produces a bad translation. This paper will show that translation error, as a whole, can have significant consequences Continue reading →

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