TRANSLATION METHODOLOGY

[Craig Berry]

On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, XiKano * wrote:

> I need a document translated from spanish to english. What do you think
> is the best way? It's pretty technical. The original is in german. Do
> you think it's better to translate the german to english? I can obtain
> the german IF it will make difference.

Every translation involves changes in meaning, so by all means go to the
German source document rather than a Spanish translation.  (I am reminded
of the old joke about the English phrase "The spirit is willing, but the
flesh is weak" being successively translated into a dozen languages and
back to English, where it arrives as "The wine is good, but the meat has
spoiled.")

> I suppose it makes a difference if the spanish is a
> poor translation, but I don't know spanish to determine this.

You'd need to know both German and Spanish to determine this, of course.
But a poor translation just accelerates the meaning-corruption process; a
good translation doesn't eliminate it.

Consider, to move on topic for a moment, the translation of 'atepetl' as
'town'; it's accurate as far as it goes, but it entirely drops the
imagistic 'water-and-hill' which would more or less subliminally be parsed
in the original Nahuatl, and color the conception of what a town is and
requires.  Then imagine translating it into Spanish as 'pueblo', which
similarly drops the physical parameters while adding (for a Spanish
speaker) rich implications about a political and social group along with
the particular cluster of buildings they inhabit.

Short version:  Translation is *hard*, and never even close to perfect.

> I heard there are "on-line" translators.

These are currently just past the toy stage.  You can use them to get a
basic idea about what a document has to say, but doing so requires
glossing over many fairly hideous (and frequently hysterical) lapses.

For example, that preceding paragraph, rendered in Spanish by Babelfish
(babelfish.altavista.com), becomes:

 Istos son actualmente pasado justo la etapa del juguete. Usted puede
 utilizarlos para conseguir una idea basica sobre un qui documento tiene
 que decir, pero el hacer asm que requiere lustrar conclumdo muchos lapsos
 bastante horribles (y con frecuencia hysterical).

(Some of the diacritical letters got messed up during my copy-and-paste,
but I'm sure it's readable.)  Taking that and translating back to English
again yields:

 These are at the moment right past the stage of the toy. You can use them
 to obtain a basic idea on what document must say, but doing so it
 requires to lustrar conclumdo many quite horrible lapses (and frequently
 hysterical).

..which isn't a bad job, as such tools go.  The sense is there more or
less intact, but I think you'll agree it would be hard to read an entire
8-page paper written that way.  And often the meaning itself gets far more
distorted, or lost entirely.

Best of luck!

--
   |   Craig Berry - cberry at cinenet.net
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