Translation is occassionally taken too lightly by some. However, translation is in fact a serious business that should be approached sensibly in order to avoid poor results. Before starting a project that involves translation bear in mind the following misconceptions regarding translation.
How many times have we misunderstood each other’s cultures, languages and intentions? How many words have been not only ‘lost’ in translation but also ‘distorted’ in translation? Anti-Westernists in the Middle East and Islamophobics in the West, regrettably, repetitively and doggedly speak with and within such ‘mistranslations’ Incited by their misperceptions, they react before they understand. They talk before they listen. They jump to conclusions before they fully probe ready-made assumptions.
So what’s it all about? Who and what is a translator? How does one become a translator? What is going on in the translation profession? This article and the other thirteen will take a close look at these and related questions.
Anything that creates unity and harmony and dispels distrust and hatred is a step forward. The translator, obviously, has a very important role to play. I think I am carrying out a task which, in their way, my parents wanted me to perform, and I know that all those teachers and friends from the older generations who guided me and helped me along wanted me to do this, too. The microcosm and the macrocosm converge somewhere—by imposing a tiny bit of order in a communication you are translating, you somehow are carving out a little bit of order in the universe. You will never succeed. Everything will fail and finally come to an end. But you have a chance to carve out a little bit of order and maybe even beauty out of the raw materials that surround you everywhere, and I think there is no other meaning in life.
Some people handle gobbledygook in translation by the hallowed GIGO (gobbledygook in, gobbledygook out) method. I don’t. I like my translations to be crystal-clear. The guys who read the stuff I translate are businesspeople and they do not have the time or the inclination to pore and ponder over a text, looking up words in an unabridged dictionary; they want to understand what they have to read the first time they skim through it. If they don’t, they say “damn the translator,” not “damn the author”.
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