Martin Boyd
“They [Mexicans] are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” – Donald Trump, candidacy speech, June 16,2015
It would be fair to say that in recent years, US-Mexican relations have hit one of their lowest points in living memory. With his promise to build a wall spanning the US-Mexican border, the current US president made hostility towards Mexico a pillar of his campaign for the White House in 2016, a hostility that proved fundamental to his baffling success. The bizarre tribal chant “Build that Wall!” shouted by thousands of supporters of Donald Trump at his incendiary campaign rallies, has gone hand-in-hand with his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” in the collective imagination of the trumpistas, for whom the exclusion and denigration of their neighbours to the south is inextricably tied to what they view as their own nation’s mission to recapture its “manifest destiny” as the world’s greatest superpower. The border wall has become the Trump nation’s most tangible symbol, a concrete manifestation of an almost pathological need to abuse and reject Mexico in order to assert American greatness.
In recent decades, many theorists of literary translation have stressed the importance of foregrounding the source culture of the translated text, to avoid what Lawrence Venuti describes as the inherent tendency of translation towards domestication, whereby the translation becomes “imprinted by the target culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies” (2008: 18). As mediators for the source culture, translators have an ethical duty to convey that culture effectively to target culture readers, resisting the assimilative undertow of the translation process while at the same avoiding the temptation of easy exoticism, falling back on cultural tropes and stereotypes which, instead of enlightening and challenging target culture readers to better understand the rich complexities of the source culture, only serve to reinforce their preconceived ideas about that culture.
The global success of a business relies on effective communication, and professional translation agencies offer the best solution to ensure this. Nearly every industry benefits from translated materials in some aspect of their business. Marketing messages, HR policies, global patent filing, and clinical trials all need to be rendered professionally into other languages to ensure local regulations are met, compliance mandates are adhered to, and your new market understands your brand messaging.
On September 25, 2006, the company Diálogos was born. I founded the business just two months after arriving in Toronto from Mexico City, with the primary purpose of providing Spanish-English translation services, but also with a broader vision of offering a forum of intercultural exchange between the Spanish- and English-speaking worlds in Canada. Over the past decade, Diálogos has evolved into a premium agency providing translation services in the legal, literary, academic and commercial fields, serving clients here in Canada and all over the world. At the same time, our broader vision of supporting exchange between Hispanic and Anglophone communities in Canada has been realized through a wide range of initiatives.
Not too long ago I received an email from someone who told me a story which, unfortunately, I’ve heard from others before. The young man was a little discouraged, not because he couldn’t find work (this was also true), but because the professors in his master’s program had taught their courses while at the same time telling their students that it was terribly hard to find work as a translator, that it all operated through cronyism, and that even so, the rates were miserable.
