José Ortega y Gasset
In this second part of José Ortega y Gasset’s essay “La miseria y el esplendor de la traducción”, the Spanish philosopher delves deeper into the question of untranslatability. The fact that translation is impossible, Ortega y Gasset argues, does not mean that it should not be attempted, but it must be approached with an attitude that he describes as that of the “good utopian”: the translator who tackles the task of translation in full awareness of its impossibility.
José Ortega y Gasset
The essay “La miseria y el esplendor de la traducción”, written in 1936, is to this day one of the most widely quoted essays on translation ever written in the Spanish language. In the essay, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) sets out his highly insightful perspective on the significance of translation for revealing the semiotic gaps that exist between different languages. Many of the ideas expounded in this essay have become key issues in the field of translation studies, particular since the “cultural turn” of the 1980s. Over the next few months, my translation of this landmark essay will appear here, split into the five sections into which the author himself divides his reflections. In the first part, “La miseria”, Ortega y Gasset explores the concept of “untranslatability”. Ortega y Gasset’s extremely personal writing style is both a pleasure and a challenge to translate. Hopefully, my translation is bold enough to subvert the great philosopher’s rather uncharitable description of translators as “timid individuals”.
Martin Boyd
One of the most thought-provoking presentations I attended at last year’s ATA conference in Chicago was the talk titled “Why Raising the Bar on Your Own Translation Quality is about to Get Deadly Serious”, delivered by Chris Durban, Kevin Hendzel and David Jemielity. The session was something of a wake-up call to freelance translators, alerting them to the increasing stratification in the industry between what they call the “bulk sector” of high-volume, medium-quality translations and the “premium sector” of high-quality work by genuine subject-matter experts. As rates continue to decrease in the bulk sector, the presenters argued, translators are faced with a perilous professional future unless they can distinguish themselves as masters of their craft, specialists in their chosen subject-fields and exceptional writers.
Martin Boyd
Pricing is a delicate topic in the translation industry. As a general rule, translators are averse to discussing their rates, and translator organizations generally avoid publishing data on rates due to concerns that such data may be viewed as price-fixing. The industry standard is to charge by the word, but while this standard is an extremely helpful tool for clients to be able to forecast how much a given project will cost, a one-size-fits-all per-word rate is problematic for those of us who know that not all words are created equal: one word may be translated in a second, while for another hours of research and deliberation may be needed to determine its best equivalent in the target language. Some texts have more of the latter kind of word than others, which is why most translators (myself included) do not publish a “standard” per word rate for all projects and all clients, opting instead to assess each project on a case-by-case basis. We thus tend to speak more of rate “ranges” than specific rates. But for novice translators who want clear advice on what they should be charging for their services, this kind of vagueness can be frustrating. So how can new freelance translators determine what rates they should be charging?
Martin Boyd
Question: How many translators does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: It depends on the context.
The above joke is probably only funny to translators and people who interact with them on a regular basis, and specifically, to anyone who has ever had the frustrating experience of asking a translator how to translate a particular word and has been met with this same answer. But the fact is, when replying to your deceptively simple question as to how to say “echar” in English, the familiar refrain “it depends on the context” is not merely an attempt to be evasive, because it really is important to know first whether your intention is to “echar algo a la basura” (throw something into the garbage), “echarme una llamada”(give me a call) or “echarme la culpa” (put the blame on me), among many other possibilities.
Martin Boyd
St. Jerome, patron saint of translators, apparently never obtained certification
Practically since the dawn of history, translation has been of vital importance to human society. All manner of interaction between different communities, whether for trade, cultural exchange, for waging war or making peace, has depended hugely upon the work of translators and interpreters. And yet it is only relatively recently that translation has begun to be consolidated as a profession. And even now, the persistence of the popular misconceptions that translation is an activity that can be mastered by any person with a working knowledge of two languages and a good bilingual dictionary, or that machine translation is effectively eliminating the need for human translators, suggests that we still have a long way to go before translation receives the respect it deserves as a profession.
Martin Boyd
Lorde: another victim of ethnocentric violence
Last October, Feministing blogger Verónica Bayetti Flores launched a scathing attack on the song “Royals”, one of the biggest hits on US radio in 2013, for lyrics that Bayetti claimed are “deeply racist”. Bayetti’s argument was based on the assertion that the song’s critique of extreme wealth draws specifically on images associated with African-American hip hop stars (“gold teeth”, “Cristal”, “Maybachs”), with no specific references that might conjure up images of white American wealth (why, for example, does the song make no reference to “golf”, “polo” or “Central Park East”?). Bayetti’s argument might have had some validity if it weren’t for one very important fact that she completely elides in her analysis of the song: Lorde, the 16 year-old singer-songwriter responsible for “Royals”, is from New Zealand.
Martin Boyd
As with all forms of professional writing, proofreading is an essential element in translation, as a second pair of eyes is often able to pick up minor (or sometimes major!) errors in the translated text that translators can miss in their own work, even when they’ve carefully proofread their work themselves. Unfortunately, most translator training programs dedicate very little time to instructing translators in how to handle proofreading tasks, which may end up involving a large proportion of their work as freelancers. With this in mind, based on my own experience as a translator, proofreader and translation project manager, I have developed a kind of “crash course” in proofreading translations, which basically consists of the following four simple rules:
Martin Boyd
Edith Grossman, the English translator of many of the works of Gabriel García Márquez and author of the book Why Translation Matters, an examination of the low profile of translation in the English-speaking world, remarks that in book reviews of translated works, “most critics assiduously ignore the fact that they are reviewing a translation. If they do refer to the translation, they usually dismiss it with a phrase like ‘ably translated by’.” (qtd. in Salisbury).
Martin Boyd
In an article published in 1987, prominent literary translator Margaret Sayers Peden took issue with Hileman’s translation of Carlos Fuentes’ classic novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz, accusing him of “total, and incredibly insensitive, restructuring” of the source text, completely undermining Fuentes’s original intention (“Translating the Boom” 170). Indeed, Hileman does appear to show an almost cavalier disregard for the punctuation and paragraphing of the original text, eliminating points of ellipsis, periods and commas and inserting paragraph breaks and lexical connectors in an apparent effort to ‘regularize’ Fuentes’s deliberately irregular style. But there is another apparently systematic omission in Hileman’s translation that Sayers Peden does not identify. That she overlooks it is not surprising, because her analysis is exclusively concerned with aesthetic questions and the omission to which I refer has implications that are more ideological than poetological.
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