What Makes A Good Translator?
Competent translators show the following attributes:
1.) a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, from
which they are translating (the source language);
2.) an excellent command of the language into which they are
translating (the target language);
3.) familiarity with the subject matter of the text being translated;
4.) a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic
correlates between the two languages, including sociolinguistic register
when appropriate; and
5.) a finely tuned sense of when to metaphrase ("translate literally")
and when to paraphrase, so as to assure true rather than spurious
equivalents between the source- and target-language texts.
A competent translator is not only bilingual but bicultural. A language
is not merely a collection of words and of rules of grammar and syntax for
generating sentences, but also a vast interconnecting system of
connotations and cultural references whose mastery, writes linguist Mario
Pei, "comes close to being a lifetime job." The complexity of the translator's
task cannot be overstated; one author suggests that becoming an
accomplished translator—after having already acquired a good basic
knowledge of both languages and cultures—may require a minimum of ten
years' experience. Viewed in this light, it is a serious misconception to
assume that a person who has fair fluency in two languages will, by virtue of
that fact alone, be consistently competent to translate between them.
The translator's role in relation to a text has been compared to that of
an artist, e.g., a musician or actor, who interprets a work of art. Translation,
like other human activities, entails making choices, and choice implies
interpretation. Mark Polizzotti writes: "A good translation offers not a
reproduction of the work but an interpretation, a re-representation, just as
the performance of a play or a sonata is a representation of the script or the
score, one among many possible representations."
A translator is faced with two contradictory tasks: when translating,
strive for omniscience; when reviewing the resulting translation, assume (the
naive reader's) ignorance.
Translators may render only parts of the original text, provided that
they inform readers of that action. But a translator should not assume the
role of censor and surreptitiously delete or bowdlerize passages merely to
please a political or moral interest.
Translators, including monks who spread Buddhist texts in East Asia,
and the early modern European translators of the Bible, in the course of their
work have shaped the very languages into which they have translated. They
have acted as bridges for conveying knowledge between cultures; and along
with ideas, they have imported from the source languages, into their own
languages, loanwords and calques of grammatical structures, idioms, and
vocabulary.
INTROSPECTION: Ask yourself, “Do you have the qualities of a good translator?”
INTERPRETING
Interpreting, or
language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between
two, or among three or more, speakers who are not speaking, or signing, the
same language. The term "interpreting," rather than "interpretation," is
preferentially used for this activity by Anglophone translators, to avoid
confusion with other meanings of the word "interpretation." Unlike English,
many languages do not employ two separate words to denote the activities
of written and live-communication (oral or sign-language) translators. Even
English does not always make the distinction, frequently using "translating"
as a synonym for "interpreting."
Nearly three centuries later, in the United States, a comparable role as
interpreter was played for the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–6 by
Sacagawea. As a child, the Lemhi Shoshone woman had been kidnapped by
Hidatsa Indians and thus had become bilingual. Sacagawea facilitated the
expedition's traverse of the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean.
In the United States today, interpreting as a line of work has become
increasingly professionalized in recent decades, and there is now a variety of
professional associations and certifications available to provide resources on
ethics and practices and ensure trustworthy, quality interpretation services.
STOP: Go to Youtube and watch Miss Universe Final Interviews. Observe how
interpreting is done.
MACHINE TRANSLATION
Machine translation (MT) is a process whereby a computer program
analyzes a source text and, in principle, produces a target text without
human intervention. In reality, however, machine translation typically does
involve human intervention, in the form of pre-editing and post-editing.
Unedited machine translation is publicly available through tools on the
Internet such as Google Translate, Babel Fish, Babylon, and StarDict. These
produce rough translations that, under favorable circumstances, "give the
gist" of the source text. With the Internet, translation software can help non-
native-speaking individuals understand web pages published in other
languages. Whole-page-translation tools are of limited utility, however, since
they offer only a limited potential understanding of the original author's
intent and context; translated pages tend to be more erroneously humorous
and confusing than enlightening.
The weaknesses of pure machine translation, unaided by human
expertise, are those of artificial intelligence itself. As of 2018, professional
translator Mark Polizzotti held that machine translation, by Google Translate
and the like, was unlikely to threaten human translators anytime soon,
because machines would never grasp nuance and connotation.
ACTIVITY 3.
Instruction: Go to any translation site (Google Translate, Babelfish, Facebook, etc.) and
encode 5 sentences in Filipino to be translated into English. Write the SL sentences and the
corresponding TL sentences here. (5 points/item)
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LITERARY TRANSLATION
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