Early in my freelance career, I failed two translation tests in a row for two different agencies. Both of these tests were marketing/PR-type pieces, and the agencies’ comments went something like this:
Agency 1: “Your translation was too faithful to the original. The French text was not very well written, and part of the translator’s job is to improve on that.”
Agency 2: “Your translation sounded great in English, but it strayed too far from the original. We want a translation that is faithful to the original, even if the original is not well written.”
Since then, I’ve learned many lessons about translation technique and about asking clients for feedback on the type of translation they want. Recently, I translated some marketing materials for a cultural festival; the document contained some factual inaccuracies and was also written in a rambling, run-on style that I thought wouldn’t work well for a U.S. audience. Although I suggested a lot of possible edits to the document, the person coordinating the project immediately let me off the stylistic hook by saying “The original is really badly written; but hey, we just translate, right? Don’t drive yourself crazy over this; you didn’t write it!”
I think that this issue of whether “we just translate” is a big one in our profession. When we receive a poorly written source document, do we “just translate it,” or do we edit it for correctness and clarity? In theory, it’s nice to think that clients would be willing to pay extra for having their document “re-crafted” into the target language, but in practice this seems tough to implement. In addition, there’s the messy matter of conflict between languages. For example, most French documents make copious use of the passive voice: mistakes were made, profits were achieved, crimes were committed, fun was had. Changing these to the type of phrasing that’s more pleasing to the English-speaking ear involves not just a stylistic tweak, but a substantive one. If we eliminate the passive voice, someone has to make the mistake or commit the crime.
In part, I think that this dilemma has to do with our own pride in our work. We don’t want to return a translation that sounds terrible, but yet we don’t want to criticize the original, especially if our client wrote it. On the other hand, editing/rewriting a poorly-written original takes time, and most often we’re getting paid by the word. Feel free to submit your thoughts; do you “just translate”?
Oh my, how timely. There is a debate raging on this very subject even as I type, though it is about silly online contest.
More seriously, though, I have heard this issue raised a number of times over the years. I must admit that I follow my own instincts and understanding of what should be done here. If I am doing patent work or other legal work involving a dispute, for example, it goes without saying that I will translate with great fidelity to the original text and make its flaws very clear. That doesn’t mean that I will not restructure the text significantly for the sake of clarity, but I do so as if I were walking in a minefield.
With marketing text, on the other hand, I am usually expected to take liberties, and even when I am not I often do, though I document the “deviations” very carefully and explain why I consider them necessary for localization purposes and what possible alternatives might be. Occasionally this will get me into “trouble” with a literalist proofreader or a PM, but showing the text to an American customer usually settles the matter quickly.
What drives me nuts are the situations where we, the translators, are expected to do the impossible. On a few occasions I’ve had end customers get huffy because certain “important information” about a product was not included in the translation. This information, of course, is nowhere to be found in the source or references available to me. On a few occasions I’ve spent hours placating people in Israel or some other faraway place and encouraging them to communicate a little more effectively within their own companies. One of my favorite memories of this kind involved having a Cajun tell me what proper US English is. I pity her clientele.
Translations really covers the whole spectrum. I do both kinds of translation. I enjoy the work I do for several behemoth agencies notorious for trying to underpay and get enormous volumes of work back super fast because it’s easy work. I just translate. They pay my minimum rate. I accept topics that are easy for me and turn everything else down. And I just translate, staying quite close to the source. Sometimes it’s so mindless I can watch TV at the same time.
At the other end of the spectrum are the literary translations where my name appears on the publication and lots of people will read my work. Or those little tags that go next museum exhibit displays. That kind of thing. Those jobs require quite a bit more finesse and some recrafting of the text. This is more work, but more artful. And often more emotionally rewarding.
The secret is finding the right balance of clients/types of work so that you don’t get too bored, but earn enough money to maintain the glorious lifestyle of a freelance translator that I love and hope I never have to give up.
I’m glad to see this brought up. I don’t think it unreasonable for us to be expected to render a text as if it were written naturally in the target language – perhaps with fewer passives, to follow Corinne’s example – but that’s a very big brief. Here in Spain, the conventional wisdom is that the translator is almost always supposed to improve the text, but my own feeling is that often I have neither the right nor the obligation. Engineers here, for example, tend to have quite florid, Edwardian writing styles, with arcane vocabulary and sentences that stretch out to the horizon. If that’s how they want to write (no-one makes them), who am I to say they should be cool and snappy? And if they specifically want their language to be made terse and efficient, or informal or whatever, I think I really should get recognition that I am doing more than translation (it’s wishful thinking, of course). I once had a set-to with an advertising agency bigwig who wanted his phrase to have a double meaning in English that it didn’t have in Spanish. How on earth is a translator expected to deal with that, without doing the work of a copywriter? Advertising copy is often deliberately worded to suggest things, an era, a style, an age group, an attitude – if you don’t follow the original language pretty closely, you’re lost.
Corinne,
This is really interesting, ditto on everything.
My comment is about the localization industry.
I have a high profile localization client, and I work on the client side. Everytime I find a “bug” in Portuguese and track it and see that it’s coming from a poorly written English, my client says: “go a little faster, we have to release in 3 days, just follow the English, no improvements allowed, we don’t have time!”. Of course, I get really frustrated, because we’re trained to be perfectionists, artists, etc. This is perhaps the worst-case scenario, they’re so focused on delivering on time for the 28-language simultaneous release that commas don’t matter. And of course, we all know that in the world of localization, every minute costs a fortune, when you add T-E-P, Linguistic QA, Project Coordination, Engineering, DTP, Project Management.
On the other hand, I have been seeing that there are some clients who are well aware that the linguistic tester may find bugs in English and are actually encourage to report them. I had a successful experience with a major localization provider who trained the testers to recognize what they called “core bugs” and report them to the client database. Sure, they wouldn’t have been found if it weren’t for localization, and of course, those are the people I like to work for!!!
I don’t personally think a translator’s job extends to finessing marketing copy all that much. If you spend too much time in the finessing department, then you should be paid more.
@Simon: So charge more. I do, and clients generally don’t have a problem with it. Nicole Schnell had some interesting observations on the way many translators deal with marketing texts. I’ve seen much the same thing. This is not what clients want, and the smart ones (and even a lot of the dumb ones) are willing to pay to have things done right.
[...] McKay of Thoughts on Translation has touched a nerve with her post on “We just translate”…or do we?” Translators have two often contradictory goals: accuracy of translation, and quality of language. [...]
Wow! It looks like this post really hit a nerve, thanks to everyone for your comments.
@Kevin, excellent point about legal type documents versus other materials. Sometimes when I translate legal documents, I even insert a translator’s note to the effect that the original document contained numerous grammatical and/or spelling errors that are not reflected in the English. Love the story about the Cajun!!
@MT, I think that’s a really important distinction between doing “informational” translations if you want to call it that, and doing work where you’re the voice of the author/artist etc. in another language. I definitely agree; some days it’s nice when the TM is king and you can whip through 5,000 words at minimum rate (while listening to the iPod!) and some days it’s nice to spend half an hour on one sentence and then think “that’s really good!”
@John, you hit the nail on the head here, especially your point about “If that’s how they want to write…” Some things (like use of passive voice) I think are just customary in some languages and not in others. But other things, like 75 word sentences and words that haven’t been in common use since the last century, well… as you said, nobody makes people write that way, so are we really meant to “fix” it?
@Cris, thanks for adding the localization viewpoint (which I know almost nothing about!). The “core bugs” idea sounds great; training people to recognize which errors really matter and which can be let go (as if translators can really ever let anything go!!)
@Simon, I agree with you. People I know who specialize in marketing translations like ad slogans and stuff like that generally charge by the hour. I think “finessing” is definitely not something that should fall into our regular per-word rate.
Excellent points. We are always quite surprised to hear that the translation should be better than the original. Linguistically, it many times is, as we are oftentimes better writers than the person who originally wrote the text, but “better” in terms of content is difficult to grasp. What exactly does “better” mean from the client’s point of view? Is the text supposed to flow better, be easier, be more high-level, target a difference audience, or did the author not do a good job at explaining a complex water desalination and we should make that better? That would be a tough one.
We do both marketing and technical texts for all our direct clients, we enjoy both. But you are all right: sometimes there are tough calls and it helps to keep through notes on the decisions you have made, which we usually do. That way, in case a question comes up, we have reference material.
BTW, for marketing slogans we have a beginning flat rate, because, you know, Nike didn’t just pay by word for “Just do it”.
When we create slogans, we also are selling all the future rights to the use of the phrase.
I think this is a question of knowing who your clients are and what they expect from you, or even more broadly the slice of the industry you work in. I work mostly with direct clients (non governmental organizations), and have had the same clients for years. Do they expect me to improve their texts? Yes. Do I do it? Definately! I give them back texts that read like they had been written in English originally because that’s what they want — and they pay me very nicely for it too and have been loyal clients.
Excellent post Corinne. I like a simple life and that’s why I just follow my client’s instructions. They think the source text is disappointing and would like the translation to be more lively? No problem! They don’t particularly care about the style of their text, which is seen as a practical text whose aim is primarily to convey clear instructions? Great!
The difference for me is my rate. Crafting a translation so it gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to its readers takes a lot more skill and time than a straightforward, no-frills job, so I charge accordingly.
Excellent, wonderful discussion. I agree with just about everything and shall add just a couple of points:
I agree with Kevin about legal stuff, I also do a lot of contracts and legal documents; if I were to suggest changes because I thought it was going to improve the style, it could cause a lot of problems, especially when you have to translate not just the words but between two different legal systems which often don’t even have the same laws/institutions/positions.
At the same time, both translating contracts and as an interpreter in business negotiations, my efforts to really make the parties understand what the other wants have often either saved or earned them a lot of money or grief.
Sometimes the only person who realises what is really going on is the translator and it can be quite irresponsible to say nothing. My clients always appreciate this type of suggestion, although as a rule they don’t care nearly as much about the standard of their marketing texts.
I’m also currently preparing a linguistic analysis for a court case where the case actually hinges on i) the extraordinarily bad translation of one clause into English and ii) the almost equally badly written original clause in Spanish.
As for money, I think the best thing to do is to set standard rates for each type of text which are high enough for you to not feel bothered about whether or not you’re earning enough for your efforts. In my experience, clients seem to get more frustrated by a hard-to-understand price structure than a slightly higher price.
This really struck a chord with me – I have recently experienced something similar. Depending on what the client wants from the finished product, these sorts of texts will usually take a lot longer than my others, but I’d always been charging the same amount. I’m glad to see that others charge accordingly, however, so I will adjust my own pricing where necessary.
Thanks!
Dear all,
For me a translation is a real ‘screenshot’ of a text.
How would you translate a text in French Parisian slang in English without finding equivalents in American or Uk slangs?
If you cannot give back the way of talking of the very specific community that actually speaks slang in Paris the translation will not cause the same feelings to an English reader as it would to a native French speaker.
I think the first mission of a translator is to be faithfull to the writer. It has to serve the writer. Even though the writer talks rubbish in a very bad French.
Thank you very much for this blog which I find highly interesting…
Dear all,
I forgot to indicate the address of my own blog for those who can speak French.
Regards to the translators community!
Joséphine