May
10
Translation as a Tool
(and Some Tools for Translating…)
Les traductions sont comme les femmes. Lorsqu’elles sont belles, elles ne sont pas fidèles, et lorsqu’elles sont fidèles elles ne sont pas belles.
—Edmond Jaloux
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been translating the catalog of an art exhibition organized by the Fondation Zervos at La Goulotte in Vézelay, France. As a result, I’ve also been waxing philosophic about the benefits of translation both as a way to master a foreign language and as a tool for writers.
Here, I’ll begin by sharing a few observations on how translation makes us better foreign language speakers and more attentive critical readers. Then, in a second post, I’ll talk about how translation is a fantastic activity (and metaphor) for writers seeking to improve their work.
Translation as a Tool
First, I want to note that while translation is often used in the classroom, it’s actually a terrible learning method for beginners. When you’re just starting out with a language, the last thing you want to do is treat it as though it were merely a code to decipher into your mother tongue or vice versa. It’s far more effective to try to think through the new language, to rely on context and repetition for understanding, and to confront its idioms and cadences directly. The brilliance of programs like Rosetta Stone, in fact, is that they disallow translation. (The downside of them is that while you might learn, say, basic French, you’re not going to be reading Proust any time soon after completing them.)
Let’s assume you already speak the source language comfortably—meaning you can converse and read a novel with relative ease, even if you don’t sound like a native or write proficiently. (After all, the passive ability to understand a language is far easier to achieve than active mastery of its spoken and written forms.) At this point, once you’ve “gotten into the head” of the language by learning its everyday usage, translation becomes a powerful method for improving your skills and expanding your comprehension of its figurative and conceptual expressiveness—in other words, the way it apprehends the complexity of the world around us.
Understand that translation/interpretation are wholly different skills from understanding/speaking. In fact, there are plenty of polyglots and even bilingual speakers who, despite their deep knowledge of both languages and their ability to switch between them effortlessly, nevertheless find it challenging to translate a text. For translation is, first and foremost, a matter of critically engaging with the original and being able to rewrite it authentically in the target language. Here’s where writing comes in—by way of critical reading.
Translating a text is like solving a complex linguistic puzzle. It requires you to attend to each word the author has written, to examine each conjugation or mood of every verb, to pay attention to the agreement between all parts of speech on a minute level, to investigate the nuance of every bit of vocabulary to ensure that it is aptly expressed in the target language. You must gauge the precise value of each word—not just its meaning, but the sum total of its denotations and connotations, as well as its resonance with a native speaker.
All this demands a talmudically intense study of the limits of each word and how they overlap—never exactly—with those of a foreign “analogue.”* By the time you’re done translating a piece, it’s as if you’ve memorized it. You know each word intimately, and you have delved into every pun, every double sense, every potential ambiguity. And finally, once you’ve identified the parts that cannot be carried over from one language to the other, you often must decide which aspects “lost in translation” you are willing to sacrifice. In short, translating requires you to develop an almost autistic attention to style—both the author’s and your own.
By requiring you to read more deeply than you ever would when passively consuming a text, translation not only opens up new vistas for your understanding of the source language, it also renews your vision (and the “visibility”) of the target language. It is, in short, a way to plumb the depths of your comprehension of a thought and how it is expressed.
Thus, as a way of training your critical reading skills, translation naturally improves your writing.
* Even simple words like pomme and apple are not a pure analogues—for in French, pommes frites means french fries, since a pomme de terre is a potato. The words therefore have different values due to their unrelated associations. There are almost no one-to-one equivalences between languages—just as there are rarely exact synonyms within a single language. Each divides the universe into into slightly different-size pieces (an idea I will talk about at greater length in my next post).
Tools for Translating
Before wrapping up, let’s pause a moment to take a look at four useful translation resources:
Google Translate sounds great… Cut and paste in some text, and Google will spit out an English version for you, right? Well, sometimes… If the text you’re translating is simple enough, the basic sense will be preserved, but the style will surely be lost. And if you plug in something even slightly complicated or poetic, you’ll get back a string of nonsense that sounds like it was written by a first-year ESL student.*
Despite its shortcomings, Google Translate is good for two things. First, it lays down an initial version of a translation that you can then easily rewrite. (Personally, I’d rather feel out the translation as I go through the text, but many translators use Google Translate on longer works to save time.) Second, the best feature of the application is that you you can click on individual words in the translation to get a drop-down list of options to fit the context. These are often useful for puzzling out a tricky construction.
* The system works by exploiting the search engine’s ability to plow through thousands of examples online and come up with a statistically determined translation of the text you’ve entered. Though GT is quite impressive given the complexity of human language, the results are often unusable. The last stanza of Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” (Et je m’en vais / Au vent mauvais / Qui m’emporte / Deçà, delà / Pareil à la / Feuille morte”), for example, comes out as “And I’m the ill wind that carries me below, beyond like a dead leaf.” Close, but no cigar…
Google itself can also be a great resource when you use it to cross-reference searches performed under different language settings. Similarly, Wikipedia is a great place to find translations of techical jargon, stock phrases, or obscure terms. For example, one of the pieces I translated involved the terms jardin à la française and fabriques (in the sense of a small building in a French landscape garden). While I understood from context what these were, I was unfamiliar with the English terms for them. Using Wikipedia in French, I was able to find parallel pages in English, which gave me confidence that they should be translated as “Garden à la française” (with the French preserved) and “follies,” respectively. In addition, I learned a lot of background information on the topic, which made translating the piece much easier.
Finally, WordReference.com is my all-time favorite translation tool. Not only is it a great online dictionary of words and phrases in 15 languages, the forums are a boon to translators. Exploring them is a bit like manually processing translation snippets the way Google does. When you have a phrase you just can’t seem to capture, you’ll often find forum posts about its various applications and you can read feedback from native speakers.
Translating as a Tool for Writers
I’ve always defined a “writer” as a person who’s passionate not only about storytelling but about language itself. Even the prose author should be a poet at heart… And so a writer who speaks only one language is, to me, like a painter who’s never enjoyed sculpture, architecture, or dance, much less heard a symphony. Being limited to a single language places an enormous blindspot on your native language skills. (More on this, too, in my second post.)
My advice: If you don’t already speak a foreign language, learn one. Indeed, learn two or three or four—and from different language families. By making you conscious of your mother tongue, foreign languages will transform you into a more conscientious wordsmith.
Continue on to Part Two: Translating from the Gibberish.
Share your reactions and your experiences with foreign languages in a comment!
