Translation must take into account a number of constraints, including context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, their idioms and the like.

 

Traditionally translation has been a human activity, though attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural-language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer-assisted translation).

 

Perhaps the most common misconception about translation is that there exists a simple "word-for-word" relation between any two languages, and that translation is therefore a straightforward and mechanical process. On the contrary, historical differences between languages often dictate differences of expression.

 

Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if it were an exact science — as if consistent one-to-one correlations existed between words and phrases in different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically-reproducible, much as in cryptography. Such novices may assume that all that is needed to translate a text is to "encode" and "decode" between languages, using a translation dictionary as the "codebook."

 

On the contrary, such a fixed relationship would only exist, were a new language synthesized and at the same time synchronized with a pre-existing language in such a way that each word would forever carry exactly the same scope and shades of meaning, with careful attention given to the preservation of etymological roots and lexical "ecological niches," assuming that these were known with certainty.

 

If the new language were subsequently to take on a life apart from such cryptographic use, each word would spontaneously begin to assume new shades of meaning and cast off previous associations, thereby vitiating any such artificial synchronization. Henceforth translation would require the disciplines described in this article.

 

There has been debate as to whether translation is an art or a craft. Literary translators, such as Gregory Rabassa in If This Be Treason, argue that translation is an art, though one that is teachable. Other translators, mostly those who work on technical, business or legal documents, regard their m�tier as a craft — one that can not only be taught, but that is subject to linguistic analysis and that benefits from academic study.

 

Whether translation is an art or craft may depend on the nature of the text being translated. A relatively simple document, e.g. a product brochure, may sometimes be translated quickly, using techniques familiar to advanced language-students. By contrast, a newspaper editorial, a political speech, or a book on almost any subject will ordinarily require not only the craft of good language skills and research technique, but a substantial knowledge of the pertinent subject matter, a cultural sensitivity, and a mastery of the art of good writing.

 

Translation has, indeed, served as a writing school for many recognized writers. And translators, including the early modern European translators of the Bible, helped shape the very languages they translated into. Along with ideas, they imported into their languages, calques of grammatical structures and of vocabulary from the source languages.

 

 

In English, a terminological distinction is drawn between translating — transferring, between languages, ideas that are expressed in writing — and interpreting, which is the transferring of ideas expressed orally or (as with sign language) by signing.

 

Although interpreting can be considered a subcategory of translation in regard to the analysis of the processes involved (translation studies), in practice the skills required for these two activities are quite different. Translators and interpreters are trained in entirely different manners. Translators receive extensive practice with representative texts in various subject areas, learn to compile and manage glossaries of relevant terminology, and master the use of both current document-related software (for example, word processors, desktop publishing systems, and graphics or presentation software) and computer-assisted translation (CAT) software tools.

 

Interpreters, by contrast, are trained in precise listening skills under taxing conditions, memory and note-taking techniques for consecutive interpreting (in which the interpreter listens and takes notes while the speaker speaks, and then after several phrases provides the version in the other language, taking turns, not speaking at the same time), and split-attention for simultaneous interpreting (in which the interpreter, usually in a booth with a headset and microphone, listens and speaks at the same time, usually producing the interpreted version only seconds after the speaker provides the original). Given the time constraints on the interpreter, his work is often somewhat less precise than the translator's.

 

Note: The traditional structuring of this chapter disregards higher-ranking and up-to-date legal liability and quality requirements, and thus now needs to be restructured under Efficient Cause below due to rogue risk management. Discussion about the matter is needed, not vandalism and tort. Compliance to the 5 Wiki pillar principles is of lack.

Fidelity (otherwise "faithfulness") and transparency are two often-competing qualities that have been regarded for millenia as ideals for translation, particularly literary translation. A critic of the 17th-century French translator Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt coined the phrase, "les belles infid�les," to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.

 

Fidelity is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning.

 

Transparency is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.

 

A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion — an "idiomatic translation." The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

 

The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.

 

The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong," and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine-translation systems, often results in patent nonsense with only a humorous value ("round-trip translation").

 

Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously strive to produce a literal translation. Literary translators and translators of religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source. In order to do this, they deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language in order to provide "local color" in the translation.

 

The concepts of fidelity and transparency are viewed differently in some recent translation theories. In some quarters, the idea is gaining momentum that acceptable translations can be as creative and original as their source texts.

 

In recent decades, the most prominent advocates of non-transparent translation modes have included the French translation scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations (L'�preuve de l'�tranger, 1984), and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones (for example, his "Call to Action" in The Translator's Invisibility, 1994).

 

Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts of German Romanticism, the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of "foreignization" being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the reader]," i.e., transparency, and those that move the "reader toward [the author]," i.e., an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter approach. His preference was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote German literature.

 

For the most part, the concepts of "fidelity" and "transparency" remain strong in Western traditions.

 

On the other hand, these concepts are under strong challenge due to emerging risk management, legal liability and quality assurance considerations:

 

From the Translators' liability source below: Jody Byne "Even literal translation, which is considerably more sophisticated than word for word translation, cannot satisfactorily cope with every translation eventuality. So by accepting that translation involves some form of intellectual addition to or processing of the information in the source text, whether by adding, removing, clarifying, interpreting, rephrasing, recontextualising or recasting information for the target audience, we are in effect accepting a role for translators which is subject to a greater degree of liability than a mere conduit of information."

Due response remains to be meager.

They are, however, not as prevalent in some non-Western ones. Thus the Indian epic, the Ramayana, has numerous versions in the many Indian languages, and the stories are different in each. If one considers the words used for translating into the Indian languages, whether those be Aryan or Dravidian languages, he is struck by the freedom that is granted to the translators. This may relate to a devotion to prophetic passages that strike a deep religious chord, or to a vocation to instruct unbelievers. Similar examples are to be found in medieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to the customs and values of the audience.

 

Note: The traditional structuring of this chapter disregards higher-ranking and up-to-date legal liability and quality requirements, and thus now needs to be structured under Efficient Cause below due to these now valid and factual lack of views including liability risks. Discussion about the matter is needed not vandalism and tort. Compliance to the 5 Wiki pillar principles is of lack.

The question of fidelity vs. transparency has also been formulated in terms of, respectively, "formal equivalence" and "dynamic equivalence."

 

"Dynamic equivalence" (or "functional equivalence") conveys the essential thought expressed in a source text — if necessary, at the expense of literality, original sememe and word order, the source text's active vs. passive voice, etc.

 

By contrast, "formal equivalence" (sought via "literal" translation) attempts to render the text "literally," or "word for word" (the latter expression being itself a word-for-word rendering of the classical Latin "verbum pro verbo") — if necessary, at the expense of features natural to the target language.

 

There is, however, no sharp boundary between dynamic and formal equivalence. On the contrary, they represent a spectrum of translation approaches. Each is used at various times and in various contexts by the same translator, and at various points within the same text — sometimes simultaneously. Competent translation, indeed, entails the judicious blending of dynamic and formal equivalents. And, in some cases, a translation may be both dynamically and formally equivalent to the original text.

 

Any written text may be a candidate for translation. The translation field is often categorized into areas of specialization. Each specialty has its own challenges and difficulties. An incomplete list of specialties includes:

 

Commercial (business) texts may include marketing and promotional materials directed to consumers, or administrative texts.

 

Objects of translation may include computer programs and related documents (manuals, help files, web sites).

 

The notion of localization, that is, the adaptation of translations to target languages and cultures, is gaining prevalence in this specialty.

 

(The term "computer translation" is sometimes used to refer to the practice of machine translation, using computers to automatically translate texts.)

 

The translation of video games is a very recent specialty. It presents a variety of challenges to translators, as they must convey the intricacies of both technical and colloquial language.

 

The pitfalls of lackluster video-game translation are exemplfied in "All your base are belong to us."

 

The translation of "general" texts. In practice, few texts are really "general"; most fall into a specialty but are not seen as such.

 

Legal

A skilled translator of legal documents (laws, contracts, treaties, etc.) is normally as adept at the law (often with in-depth legal training) as at translation, since inaccuracies in legal translations can have serious consequences. An example of problematic translation is the Treaty of Waitangi, where the English and Maori versions differ in certain important respects.

 

Sometimes, in order to prevent such problems, one language is declared authoritative, with translations not being considered legally binding. In many cases, however, this is not feasible, as one party does not wish to be seen as subservient to the other.

 

If the translation of non-literary works is regarded as a skill, the translation of literary works (novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.) is much more of an art. In multilingual countries such as Canada, translation is often considered a literary pursuit in its own right. Figures such as Sheila Fischman, Robert Dickson and Linda Gaboriau are notable in Canadian literature specifically as translators, and the Governor General's Awards present prizes for the year's best English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations.

 

Writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Vasily Zhukovsky have also made a name for themselves as literary translators.

 

Poetry is considered by many the most difficult genre to translate, given the difficulty in rendering both the form and the content in the target language. In 1959 in his influential paper "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," the Russian-born linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson went so far as to declare that "poetry by definition [was] untranslatable." In 1974 the American poet James Merrill wrote a poem, "Lost in Translation," which in part explores this. The question was also considered in Douglas Hofstadter's 1997 book, Le Ton beau de Marot.

 

Translation of sung texts — sometimes called "singing translation" — is closely linked to translation of poetry because most vocal music, at least in the Western tradition, is set to verse, especially verse in regular patterns with rhyme. (Since the late 19th century, musical setting of prose and free verse has also been practiced in some art music, though popular music tends to remain conservative in its retention of stanzaic forms with or without refrains.) A rudimentary example of translating poetry for singing is church hymns, such as the German chorales translated into English by Catherine Winkworth.

 

Translation of sung texts is generally much more restrictive than translation of poetry, because in the former there is little or no freedom to choose between a versified translation and a translation that dispenses with verse structure. One might modify or omit rhyme in a singing translation, but the assignment of syllables to specific notes in the original musical setting places great challenges on the translator. There is the option in prose, less so in verse, of adding or deleting a syllable here and there by subdividing or combining notes, respectively, but even with prose the process is nevertheless almost like strict verse translation because of the need to stick as closely as possible to the original prosody.

 

Other considerations in writing a singing translation include repetition of words and phrases, the placement of rests and/or punctuation, the quality of vowels sung on high notes, and rhythmic features of the vocal line that may be more natural to the original language than to the target language.

 

Whereas the singing of translated texts has been common for centuries, it is less necessary when a written translation is provided in some form to the listener, for instance, as an insert in a concert program or as projected titles in a performance hall or visual medium.

 

Like pharmaceutical translation, medical translation is a specialty in which a mistranslation can have grave consequences. In practice, translators working in this field generally have formal educations in the medical sciences in addition to standard translation qualifications.

 

Pedagogic translation is translation practiced as a means of learning a second language.

 

It is used to enrich (and assess) a student's vocabulary in the second language, help assimilate new syntactic structures, and verify the student's understanding.

 

Unlike other types of translation, pedagogic translation takes place in the student's native (or dominant) language as well as in the second language. That is, the student will translate both to and from the second language.

 

Another difference between this and other modes of translation is that the goal is often literal translation of phrases taken out of context, and of text fragments, which may be completely fabricated for the purposes of the exercise.

 

Pedagogic translation should not be confused with scholarly translation.

 

The translation of scientific research papers, abstracts, conference proceedings, and other publications from one language into another. The specialized technical vocabulary used by researchers in each discipline demand that the translator of scientific texts have technical as well as linguistic expertise.

 

The translation of specialized texts written in an academic environment.

 

Scholarly translation should not be confused with pedagogical translation.

 

The translation of technical texts (manuals, instructions, etc.). More specifically, texts that contain a high amount of terminology, that is, words or expressions that are used (almost) only within a specific field, or that describe that field in a great deal of detail.

 

Dialogues and narrations of feature movies and foreign TV programs need to be translated for local viewers. In this case, translation for dubbing and translation for film subtitles demand different versions for the best effect. Thus, unlike the original language, the subtitles of the translated language are quite often not verbatim with the dialogue.

 

 

 

Discussions — in modern times, copious — of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The distinction that had been drawn by the ancient Greeks between "metaphrase" ("literal" translation) and "paraphrase" would be adopted by the English poet and translator John Dryden (1631-1700), who represented translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," or equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language:

 

"When [words] appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense."

 

Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation," i.e. of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..."

 

This general formulation of the central concept of translation — equivalence — is probably as adequate as any that has been proposed ever since Cicero and Horace, in first-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" ("verbum pro verbo").

 

Despite occasional theoretical diversities, the actual practice of translators has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents — "literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary — for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style, verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context.

 

In general, translators have sought, where possible, maximally to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes, and hence word order — when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure. The grammatical differences between fixed-word-order languages (e.g., English, French, German) and free-word-order languages (e.g., Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian) have been no impediment in this regard.

 

When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed them, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of "calques" (French for "tracings") between languages, and to their importation from Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages.

 

In general, the greater the contact and exchange that has existed between two languages, or between both and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating between them. However, due to shifts in "ecological niches" of words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. The English "actual," for example, should not be confused with the cognate French "actuel" (meaning "present," "current") or the Polish "aktualny" ("present," "current").

 

The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, Roman adapter of Greek comedies, in the second century BCE. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive and mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics as early as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon.

 

If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether.

 

The first European to assume that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language may have been Martin Luther, translator of the Bible into German. Certainly since Johann Gottfried Herder, in the 18th century, it has been axiomatic that one works only toward his own language.

 

Further compounding all these demands upon the translator is the fact that not even the most complete dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translation. Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had earlier been made in 1783 by Onufry Andrzej Kopczyński, member of Poland's Society for Elementary Books, who was called "the last Latin poet."

 

The special role of the translator in society was well described in an essay, published posthumously in 1803, by Ignacy Krasicki — Poland's La Fontaine, Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek:

 

"[T]ranslation... is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; [it] should be [practiced] by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render to their country."

 

Religious texts
Translation of religious works has played an important role in history. Buddhist monks who translated the Indian sutras into Chinese often skewed their translations to better reflect China's very different culture, emphasizing notions such as filial piety.

 

A famous mistranslation of the Bible is the rendering of the Hebrew word "keren," which has several meanings, as "horn" in a context where it actually means "beam of light." As a result, artists have for centuries depicted Moses the Lawgiver with horns growing out of his forehead. An example is Michelangelo's famous sculpture. Christian anti-Semites used such depictions to spread hatred of the Jews, claiming that they were devils with horns.

 

One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the rendering of the Old Testament into Greek in the third century B.C.E. The resulting translation is known as the Septuagint, a name that alludes to the "seventy" translators (seventy-two in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the Bible on the island of Paphos. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in a separate cell, and legend has it that all seventy versions were identical. The Septuagint became the source text for later translations into many languages, including Latin, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian.

 

Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translation, is still considered one of the greatest translators in history for rendering the Bible into Latin. The Roman Catholic Church used his translation (known as the Vulgate) for centuries, but even this translation at first stirred much controversy.

 

The period preceding and contemporary with the Protestant Reformation saw the translation of the Bible into local European languages, a development that greatly affected Christianity's split into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, due to disparities between Catholic and Protestant versions of crucial words and passages.

 

Martin Luther's Bible in German, Jakub Wujek's in Polish, and the King James Bible in English had lasting effects on the religions, cultures and languages of those countries.

 

 

Machine translation

Machine translation (MT) is a procedure whereby, in principle, a computer program, once activated, analyses a source text and produces a target text, without further human intervention.

 

In reality, however, machine translation typically does involve human intervention, in the form of pre-editing and post-editing. An exception to that rule might be, e.g., the translation of technical specifications (strings of technical terms and adjectives), using a dictionary-based machine-translation system.

 

To date, machine translation — a major goal of natural-language processing — has met with limited success.

 

Machine translation has been brought to a large public by tools available on the Internet, such as AltaVista's Babel Fish, and by low-cost programs such as Babylon, and freeware such as Lingoes and StarDict. These tools produce a "gisting translation" — a rough translation that "gives the gist" of the source text.

 

With proper terminology work, with preparation of the source text for machine translation (pre-editing), and with re-working of the machine translation by a professional human translator (post-editing), commercial machine-translation tools can produce useful results, especially if the machine translation system is integrated with a translation memory or globalization management system.

 

In regard to texts (e.g., weather reports) with limited ranges of vocabulary and simple sentence structure, machine translation can deliver results that do not require much human intervention to be useful. Also, the use of a controlled language, combined with a machine-translation tool, will typically generate largely comprehensible translations, as demonstrated at Uwe Muegge's website.

 

Engineer and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has predicted that, by 2012, machine translation will be powerful enough to dominate the field of translation. Likewise, in 2004, MIT's Technology Review listed universal translation and interpretation as likely to become available "within a decade." Such claims have, however, been made since the first serious forays into machine translation, in the 1950s.

 

Relying on machine translation exclusively ignores the fact that communication in human language is context-embedded and that it takes a person to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of probability. It is certainly true that even purely human-generated translations are prone to error. Therefore, to ensure that a machine-generated translation will be useful to a human being and that publishable-quality translation is achieved, such translations must be reviewed and edited by a human.

 

Uwe Muegge, however, has asserted that in certain applications, e.g. product descriptions written in a controlled language, a dictionary-based machine translation system has been demonstrated in a production environment to produce perfect translation results that do not require any human intervention.

 

Computer-assisted translation (CAT), also called computer-aided translation, is a form of translation wherein a human translator creates a target text with the assistance of a computer program. In computer-assisted translation, the machine supports a human translator.

 

Computer-assisted translation can include standard dictionary and grammar software. The term, however, normally refers to a range of specialized programs available to the translator, including translation-memory, terminology-management, concordance, and alignment programs.

 

This is a new area of interest in the field of translation studies. Cultural translation is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture. The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analyzing the nature of transformation in cultures. For example, ethnography is considered a translated narrative of an abstract living culture.

 

 

Jody Byrne, "Caveat Translator: Understanding the Legal Consequences of Errors in Professional Translation," JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation., Issue 07 - January 2007:
"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."
"Even literal translation, which is considerably more sophisticated than word for word translation, cannot satisfactorily cope with every translation eventuality. So by accepting that translation involves some form of intellectual addition to or processing of the information in the source text, whether by adding, removing, clarifying, interpreting, rephrasing, recontextualising or recasting information for the target audience, we are in effect accepting a role for translators which is subject to a greater degree of liability than a mere conduit of information."
Elisabeth Keller-Stoltenhoff, Werkvertrag vs Dienstvertrag (Teil 1-3) Up-to-date German source. Part 3 with information on the question about liability impacts due to breach of contract (job order contract, Werkvertrag) is to be published in September 2007.
Steaming translation risk management issues emerge that put the traditional management of topics in a new light. Discussion about the matter is needed, not vandalism and tort. Compliance to the 5 Wiki pillar principles is of lack.

 

"The general examples and case studies presented illustrate the range of problems errors can cause and they show that the issue of faulty translations is not something which exists solely within academic discussions of translation and translation quality assurance. Instead, translation error, like translation, is a real-world phenomenon which has real-world implications for everyone who comes into contact with translations. It is clear from the case studies presented that the consequences of translation error are very real and that they are something we should be genuinely concerned about. The examples of errors in technical translations serve to reinforce the gravity of this issue and show that translation errors can have disastrous and potentially fatal consequences.

 

While translators have a clear duty of care to their clients and they must elicit from clients what purpose translations are intended to serve, realistically speaking, translators cannot extract information from clients when the clients themselves do not have the answers. While standards such as [the now invalid] DIN 2345 "Translation Contracts" [and successed by EN-15038:2006] represent an attempt to improve the translation process and to ensure that both translator and client are aware of their responsibilities, the onus still rests with the translator to produce translations which comply with standard procedures to the best of their ability.

 

Translators can protect themselves to a certain extent and limit their liability in the event of defective translations by not overstating their abilities or making unrealistic promises as to the quality of the translations and by keeping clear records of how they deal with problematic parts of a text (Ansaldi 1999:14). They nevertheless can be found liable under both contract law and under tort law and it behoves them to ensure that they make all reasonable efforts to familiarise themselves with the subject material, source and target conventions and the relevant legislation and requirements governing the texts being translated. Even where translators are not or cannot be held liable for translation errors, there are surely ethical issues involved and the translator has a certain moral responsibility to the injured party. The translation community itself is entitled to expect that its members do not tarnish its image or prejudice its reputation as a result of careless, negligent work.

 

Despite the apparent lack of cases where translators are held to account for the quality of their work, the potential for litigation is never far away and as technical translators we should always be aware of this and strive to minimise the risk to which we expose ourselves."

 

In the light of this significant knowledge, facts, and ramifications emerging, the way previous topics were covered thus demands new restructuring. Previous basic assumptions, attitudes, behaviors, structures, and processes are obsolete in this light.

 

I. What liability risks are we even talking about? (non-exhaustive list)

 

Translation is inherently a difficult activity. Translators also face additional well-known problems, which makes the process even more difficult, thus more risky from a liability view:

 

Changes made to the text during the translation process
Illegible or difficult-to-read text
Inconsistent use of terminology
Misspelled or misprinted text
Incomplete text
Poorly written text (ambiguity or incomprehensibility)
Missing references in the text (for example the translator is to translate captions to missing photos)
The source text contains a translation of a quotation that was originally made in the target language, and the original text is unavailable, making word-for-word quoting nearly impossible
Obvious inaccuracies in the source text (for example "prehistoric Buddhist ruins", when Buddhism was not founded during prehistoric time

 

Dialect terms and neologisms
Unexplained acronyms and abbreviations
Proper names of people, organizations, places, and the like (often there are already official target-language translations, but if they are not supplied with the source text they can be difficult to find)
Obscure jargon
Obscure idioms
Slang
Stylistic differences, such as redundant phrases in a source language, when redundancy is frowned upon in the target language
Differences between languages with respect to punctuation conventions

 

Rhymes, puns and poetic meters
Subtle but important properties of language such as euphony or dissonance
Highly specific cultural references
Humor
Words that are commonly known in one culture but generally unknown by the layperson in another culture, such as Chinese 芬多精 (fen1 duo1 jing1) meaning phytoncide: these generally require the addition of an explanation

 

The question of whether particular words are untranslatable is often debated, with lists of "untranslatable" words being produced from time to time. These lists often include words such as saudade, a Portuguese word as an example of an "untranslatable". It translates quite neatly however as "sorrowful longing", but does have some nuances that are hard to include in a translation; for instance, it is a positive-valued concept, a subtlety which is not clear in this basic translation.

 

Some words are hard to translate only if one wishes to remain in the same grammatical category. For example, it is hard to find a noun corresponding to the Russian почемучка (pochemuchka) or the Yiddish שלימזל (shlimazl), but the English adjectives "inquisitive" and "jinxed" correspond just fine.

 

Journalists are naturally enthusiastic when linguists document obscure words with local flavor, and are wont to declare them "untranslatable", but in reality these incredibly culture-laden terms are the easiest of all to translate, even more so than universal concepts such as "mother". This is because it is standard practice to translate these words by the same word in the other language, borrowing it for the first time if necessary. For example, an English version of a menu in a French restaurant would rarely translate p�t� de foie gras as "fat liver paste", although this is a good description. Instead, the accepted translation is simply p�t� de foie gras, or, at most, foie gras p�t�. In some cases, only transcription is required: Japanese 山葵 (わさび) translates into English as wasabi. A short description or parallel with a familiar concept is also often acceptable: わさび may also be translated as "Japanese horseradish" or "Japanese mustard".

 

The more obscure and specific to a culture the term is, the simpler it is to translate. For example, the name of an insignificant settlement such as Euroa in Australia is automatically just "Euroa" in every language in the world that uses the Roman alphabet, whilst it takes some knowledge to be aware that Saragossa is Zaragoza, Saragosse, etc. or that China is 中国, Cina, Chine, and so forth.

 

The words that are truly difficult to translate are often the small, common words, whose precise meaning depends heavily on context. For example, in all its various uses the verb "to get" covers nearly seven columns of the most recent version of the Robert-Collins French-English dictionary. The same is true for most apparently simple, common words, such as "go" (seven columns), "come" (four and a half columns), and so forth.

 

Cultural aspects can complicate translation, as people from England, France or China would likely describe or draw "bread", du pain or 面包 (mi�n bāo) as their culturally common bread — an idea best expressed by their word for bread, rather than another language's word which comes pre-loaded with its cultural referent.

 

Differing levels of precision inherent in a language also play a role. For example, if one is discussing a location that is nearer to the listener than the speaker in Spanish, one would say ah�; if it is away from both interlocutors one would say all�; and if there are connotations or directions involved such as "near there", "over yonder" or "on that side", it would be best to say all�. Conversely, in colloquial French, all three of these concepts of different "theres" as well as the concept of "here" will likely be expressed with the word l�.

 

One language may contain expressions which refer to concepts that do not exist in another language. For example, the French "tutoyer" and "vouvoyer" would both translate into English as "to address as 'you'," since the English singular-informal second-person pronoun "thou" is now an archaism and not generally used. Yet such an English translation vitiates the meaning of the French verbs: "vouvoyer" means to address using the plural or formal "vous," whereas "tutoyer" means to use the singular-informal "tu." Indeed, when English used "thou," its use was the English equivalent of the French "tutoyer"; today it is difficult to give a concise English translation that captures the nuances of the French "tu" and "vous."

 

The problem often lies in failure to distinguish between translation and glossing. Glossing gives a short (usually one-word) equivalent for each term. Translation decodes the meaning and intent at the text level (not the word level or even sentence level) and then re-encodes them in a target language. Words like saudade and שלימזל are hard to "gloss" into a single other word, but given two or more words they can be perfectly adequately "translated". Similarly, depending on the context, the meaning of the French word "tutoyer", or Spanish "tutear", could be translated as "to be on first name terms with". "Bread" has perhaps a better claim to being untranslatable, since even if we resort to saying "French bread", "Chinese bread", "Algerian bread", and the like, we are relying on our audience knowing what these are like.