We are ready to submit to your attention the second part of yesterday’s article about The Hidden Life of Translators, by B. Fraser and H.T.Beeth.

Knowing what you do

 The translator’s art is made up of hundreds of different internal strategies and substrategies. Very little is known about this phenomenon – only exceptionally perceptive translators ever even become aware of them. Scientific study of such internal, subjective experience would be so complex that it has not really been started. Moreover, such strategies are rarely, if ever, taught in translating courses, which tend to concentrate on the more straightforward external, empirical observables such as the finished product and the original text.

But whether we consciously know what we are doing or not, we already use most of these subconscious language routines as a matter of course; we just do not understand from the inside how they work (like we don’t know how we understand language itself). Individual translators spend their professional lives developing and refining their personal strategies, but rarely do they share or discuss them with colleagues. Often the strategies never even break through into awareness.

The present authors like to see this state of affairs redressed, because you can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand how you got into it. You can’t improve your performance if you don’t know what it is you’re doing (or not doing) at this moment, unless it is by accident. One of our tools as professional translators must therefore be the ability to observe our own performance in as much detail as possible and steadily refine it over time. This takes practice and self-discipline. You don’t wake up one morning competent in conscious self-observation: it is a capacity you develop gradually. However, it is worth the effort because it is something you can practice in every area of your life and the benefits are by no means restricted to your professional activities.

Because this area of strategies is so crucial, yet so complex, we prefer to concentrate here and in Sections 2 and 3 on “enabling strategies” that can help translators to bring into awareness and develop the routines they use unconsciously already, in ways that will help them to access them more easily and at will.

 State control

 You need only listen to a sports commentary for five minutes to know that what makes a golf champion or a world-class sprinter is not so much their technical competence (highly competent sportsmen and women are remarkably common) as their ability to consistently control their internal state. The winner of the Wimbledon tennis final, for example, must sustain a state of acute but relaxed concentration under extreme pressure (also created by the mind – after all, no-one’s survival is at stake) – and a touch of joy and humour will win them the crowd into the bargain.

This applies equally well to translators. We all know what it is like to have to function under pressure. Keeping that deadline is more important for some documents than for others. Extremely high quality is more important for some documents than others. General presupposition among translators include the belief that speed and quality cannot go together. This generalization might be too simplistic, however. One key to professionalism in translation is the ability to control one’s internal state so as to be able to produce top style and accuracy, even under time pressure.

Examples of internal states (and components of states) which translators can learn to access at will:

Ø      Immersion (translating state)

Ø      Critical distance

Ø      Naiveté (seeing with fresh eyes)

Ø      Concentration

Ø      Relaxation

Ø      Focusing on the big picture

Ø      Focusing on small details

 Translating is one of the most demanding and difficult intellectual pursuits that exists. Over and above the level of linguistic competence, general knowledge of the world and mental flexibility that is required, translators must also be almost entirely self-motivated if they are to stay in the business long enough to gain worthwhile experience, self-critical if they are to maintain high standards and continue to improve the quality of their work, and, on top of all that, able to self-train.

The translating world has probably changed more in the last ten years that it had since the beginning of written texts (the advent of printing was a mere blip). The introduction of PCs has created an intense learning situation for almost everybody in the profession. Translators who wish to stay on top of the market are having to learn new methods at a rate and volume they may never have experienced before in their professional lives. Yet while there is constant change in the tools and media which translators are required to master in order to work satisfactorily with the full range of clients, the actual act of language transfer seems to remain stubbornly and eternally the same. It is a task which must (we believe) be carried out by the human mind in the way it always has been, since biblical times and before.

Seen in this light, it is tempting to restrict our learning to mastering the new tools. It is hard to go on working at basics skills which have already been mastered to the best of one’s ability and it is easiest to continue applying our native creativity to translating itself (the content of our translations) rather than how we translate (the process of translating). This is because we may never have acquired the habit of observing our working selves. Many of us live with an assumption that what we do is not observable and cannot be brought into conscious awareness without it slipping dream-like through our fingers. And yet, by the end of every translation we have added new knowledge to our repertoire – knowledge about the world, the subject matter treated by the text document structure in general, new tips about manipulating computer software, new sources of reference material or terminology, etc. By consciously inventorising and integrating these learnings as we end one job, we effectively deepen the experience and competence which we can bring to bear as we start out on the next.

 Professionalism: not product but process

 No one writing seriously about translation these days would claim that it is a scientific activity; it remains essentially a craft. But what is it that makes a good craftsman? One element is certainly knowing the materials and tools and what effects can be obtained with them. But because most of the key tools of translating are invisible, i.e. mental processes, discussion of what makes for more professionalism is often inconclusive. And because, as human beings, our relationship to language and thinking is so intimate, most of the areas that fall within translating professionalism are extremely private and sensitive, and therefore not willingly discussed by translators themselves.

Nevertheless, we believe that the exploration of the translating process as experienced from inside by the translator is crucial, because it is in the processes that the quality is created. While our clients are interested in the product, as professional translators we need to pay as much attention to the process as to the product, if not more.

Situating quality inside the process in this way frees us from the uncomfortable truth widely accepted in professional translating circles that better quality needs more time. In our view, there is no direct relation between quality and time: what takes time is the process in itself, regardless of whether it leads to a good result or a poor one. As we shall see, what generally distinguishes a good translation from a mediocre or poor one is not the length of time taken but the attention and commitment invested by the translator in the process of translating it.

In the next section we describe some of the meta-strategies that provide a “substrate” for the more detailed strategies of the translating process. Once we master these strategies consciously, we can powerfully augment the effects of any adjustments we might make to the micro-strategies that can help us to guarantee the quality of the finished product (dealt with in the final section).

 …to be continued