WHOSE TRANSLATION IS IT ANYWAY? A TRANSLATOR'S CONFLICTING LOYALTIES[1]
By Sergio Viaggio, United Nations
Traditional models of communication speak of a simple chain whose links are a sender, a message and a receiver.
WRITER TEXT READER
More sophisticated diagrams embed this chain in a situation/culture. On such basis, elementary models of translation simply de-couple the chain into two legs: sender-original-translator (as receiver) / translator (as sender)-translation-receiver.
CULTURE I CULTURE II
COMMUNICATION COMMUNICATION
SITUATION I SITUATION II
WRITER TEXT TRANSLATOR
TRANSLATOR TEXT READER
As we shall see, reality is far from that simple, especially in the case of in-house translators such as ourselves. UN documents, as most pragmatic texts, tend to have no identifiable sender, they also pursue different objectives, perform diverse functions and fit different types: political statements, administrative circulars and instructions, factual reports, etc. From the beginning, the translator is faced with two sources of the original: the delegation or Secretariat department as sender, and whoever has actually penned the piece as author. To make things worse, the translator may realise that the original he is asked to translate violates --or would violate for the readers of the translation-- the maxims of conversation[2]: it may be repetitive and over-explicit (quantity), or tedious, patronising or abstruse (manner); it may teem with irrelevant information (relation), or be unnecessarily unnatural (idiomaticity); and it may thus abuse the reader's willingness to understand and thus conspire against the principle of cooperation. A third ghost thus casts its demanding shadow over our translator: the potential readership, whose formal expectations may differ from culture to culture, and therefore from language to language. In this respect, and despite official policy, objectively speaking all official languages are not equal: Our translator should be aware that the English, and to a lesser extent the French text will be read more or less universally; whilst, basically, the Russian will be read in the multicultural ex-USSR, the Arabic in the rather heterogeneous Arabic world, the Spanish in monocultural Spain and Latin America, and the Chinese just in China. The potential receivers having narrowed down to a single, more or less homogenous readership, the Spanish translator --and even more so the Chinese, I would think-- should in principle feel freer (or more bound) to produce a more idiomatic text. As always, the main notions to be retained are the skopos[3] of the text, the function it is to perform in the target culture, and its type. Also, since most of these documents are written by non-native speakers (or native speakers who are incompetent writers), the rule of thumb is that translations should be better --and more often than not shorter-- than their originals; in other words, translations ought to be user-friendly. It does happen, however, that the sender does not see his text's shortcomings and demands that they be respected - a bit like the patient who asserts that there is no need for him to quit smoking, no matter what the physician says. The translator's role becomes then akin to that of the Galen: he can bring the author to the water, but he cannot force him to drink, especially if the author is the one who pays. But, as the doctor, the translator has the professional duty to bring the author to the water and explain the reason for his professional opinion. If he has meekly to accept the author's worse judgment, the translation is no longer his, but the author's, whereupon, as the physician, all he can an must do is decline responsibility.
The above, I submit, applies mutatis mutandis to well nigh every UN text. For translation purposes, I suggest that we divide them into three more or less distinct categories. The first batch is mainly comprised by what Nord calls documentary texts; in our case this category would comprise all manner of political statements, either from the Secretariat itself or from delegations or groups of delegations. A political text argues and defends eminently arguable and attackable positions; it intentionally both shows and hides, speaks the truth and lies, threatens and cajoles. The sender wants it to be as effective as possible; unless ambiguity, obscurity and other formal shortcomings are intentional --in which case they must, if possible, remain in the translation-- they are unintentional - in which case they must, if possible, be corrected in the translation, since the translator's ultimate point of reference cannot be but the sender's intention. The text below (a 'faithful' back-translation of the original Russian)[4] is a clear example of a straightforward intention incompetently expressed:
COMMISSION ON DISARMAMENT
Basic session of 1991
New York, 22 April-13 May 1991
Point 4 of the agenda
OBJECTIVE INFORMATION ON MILITARY QUESTIONS
Aims, principles and mechanisms of openness
in the military sphere
Working document submitted by the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics
In order to help the transformation of military openness into a universal norm of international life it would be possible to agree that measures of openness under the aegis of the UN, in particular, provided for:
- the annual submission by states to the UN on a voluntary basis of data about the numbers of their armed forces (globally and pro rata by basic types - land troops, military air forces, military naval forces, other); by basic types of armaments (tanks, armoured combat vehicles, artillery, combat airplanes and helicopters, major surface ships (including landing ones), submarines); by numbers of troops outside national territory; for nuclear powers - also by launching installations for IBM's, ballistic missiles on submarines, heavy bombers, land based tactical nuclear missiles;
- annual submission by states on a voluntary basis of data to the standardised system of accounting for military expenditures effective at the UN;
- increase of the predictability of the military construction of states -members of the UN by means of mutual assurances of the transparent character of the military budgets of the states - members of the UN.
Within the overall awkwardness, there is one clear mistake: the information is not to be submitted to the reporting system but according to or in conformity with it; also, universal is redundant. As can be seen in the appendix, only the French translation has corrected both.
The skopos of the text, on the other hand, may be simply to inform - in Nord's terminology these would be instrumental texts. It is the case with most documents whose sender is the Secretariat: all manner of reports, UNDP and other projects, budget presentations, brochures, administrative circulars and instructions, etc. The crucial difference between these and political texts is that they do not purport to represent somebody's opinion about reality but reality itself. Their translations, therefore, would normally have the same aim: they are not there to represent the original texts but the reality expressed in them. The most obvious example would be instructions: provided that all readers are instructed to do the same for the same reasons, who cares about formal resemblances between the language versions? The translator must all but forget about the form of the original and become unabashedly reader-bound; he should not hesitate to smooth syntax, improve vocabulary, or do away with parasitic repetitions and irrelevant information. Such is the case with the two paragraphs below, extracted from a Report on the Status of the World Environment published by UNEP in 1991.
51. Biological diversity (or biodiversity) encompasses all species of plants, animals, and micro-organisms and the ecosystems and ecological processes of which they are parts. It is usually considered at three different levels: genetic diversity, species diversity, and ecosystem diversity. Genetic diversity is the sum total of genetic information, contained in the genes of individual plants, animals, and micro-organisms that inhabit the Earth. Species diversity refers to the variety of living organisms on Earth. Ecosystem diversity relates to the variety of habitats, biotic communities, and ecological processes in the biosphere, as well as the tremendous diversity within ecosystems in terms of habitat differences and the variety of ecological processes.
52. No one knows the number of species on Earth, even to the nearest order of magnitude. Estimates vary from 5 to 80 million species or more. Only about 1.4 million of these living species have been briefly described. Of these about 750,000 are insects, 41,000 are vertebrates and 250,000 are plants; the remainder consists of a complex array of invertebrates, fungi, algae and other micro-organisms. [175 words]
Notice that these pargraphs are hopelessly repetitive and irritatingly over-explicit. Among other things, in the first one alone diversity is repeated eight times (quantity); both mentions of the Earth are unnecessary (relation); refers and relates are used incorrectly as synonyms of encompasses; the first sentence in paragraph 52 is a nightmare; while other in the last line clearly means sundry. To boot, the whole text reads more like a text-book for young students than a report addressed to experts and officials (manner), which taxes the reader's patience thus sabotaging his willingness to understand (cooperation). The translations should be concise, clear and idiomatic. A possible Spanish translation, for instance, could read as follows:
51. La diversidad biológica (o biodiversidad) comprende todas las especies de vegetales, animales y microorganismos, como también los ecosistemas y procesos ecológicos en que se integran. Suele considerarse a tres niveles: genes, especies y ecosistemas. Por diversidad genética se entiende toda la información contenida en los genes de cada planta, animal y microorganismo; la de las especies abarca los organismos vivos; y la de los ecosistemas los distintos hábitats, comunidades bióticas y procesos ecológicos, así como las enormes diferencias de hábitats y procesos ecológicos que se dan en cada ecosistema
51. La cantidad de especies que habitan nuestro planeta no se conoce ni aproximadamente. Los cálculos oscilan de cinco a 80 millones o más, de los cuales apenas 1,4 se ha descrito siquiera someramente: 750.000 insectos, 41.000 vertebrados y 250.000 especies vegetales. El resto es una conjunto heterogéneo de invertebrados, hongos, algas y microorganismos diversos.
[144 words]
What both kinds of texts discussed above have in common is that, apart from the revisor and maybe someone with the sending delegation, nobody is really expected to compare the original and the translations. Yet there is a third category of UN documents that are, more or less by definition, to be collated and checked against each other: negotiating texts - all manner of drafts submitted for collective approval, via collective and often multilingual editing. It is in these texts that differences between languages become apparent, since amendments are more often than not metalingual, in the sense that they refer to the language itself rather than to the sense conveyed by it. It is also in these texts that some delegates (and, in my experience, most especially speakers of Spanish) become enthralled by cognates or first meanings in pocket dictionaries and demand that the Spanish translation read desafío for the English challenge, compromiso for commitment, or confrontación for confrontation. Bereft of competent linguists, many delegations tend to massacre both form and content in the translated text. What is the translator to do in such cases? As always, try and defend language, profession, dignity and common sense, mindful that his chances of succeeding are only as good as his ability to defend his choices convincingly, to explain the rationale --i.e. the theory-- behind them; and that requires much more than sheer intuition, no matter how refined.
Since I have had the use of theory (and not before) I have been an adamant foe of literalism and any other form of formal servitude, unless there are valid reasons for it. I have always argued that in a pragmatic text, whether a UN document, an instructions manual, a law or a tourist brochure, that is to function in the target culture, there ought not to be even a whiff of translation. If an original is perfectly idiomatic, there is no valid reason for the translation not to be perfectly idiomatic also; and if an original is un-idiomatic, intentional awkwardness (Poirot's English is unidiomatic because he, not Agatha Christie, is Belgian) is the only valid reason for the translation not to be perfectly idiomatic all the same. Recently, a Spanish colleague contended that if original and translations are to be collated, and jointly discussed and amended, it saves a lot of time and trouble if all texts more or less correspond formally to each other, even at the cost of idiomaticity. As an interpreter having to shift through four language versions at a time, I begrudgingly concede his point: for comparison purposes, ready comparability is definitely an asset. Still, I doubt very much that Chinese or Arabic lend themselves to such ready formal parallelism with Indo-European idioms. At the UN at least, even if they be not European themselves, advocates of literalness are Euro-centric, and more specifically Anglocratic (no wonder it is the French who fight literalness most adamantly!). Be that as it may, once the text has been approved in any given language, the definitive translations must be idiomatic. International conventions are a case in point: all language versions are equally authoritative, therefore, not only must they allow and forbid the same things under the same circumstances, but they should read as native, i.e. natural, idiomatic pieces of legislation. So if I concede that the negotiating drafts may attempt as far as possible at having pages, lines and even words more or less coincide, I still argue that the final texts, the ones that are to function autonomously in the different target cultures and languages should be a model of elegant and concise idiomatic use. After all, next to the great writers, who is supposed to be the best masters and users of any language but professional translators?
The following couple of paragraphs, extracted from UNEP's resolution 18/6 is a case in point:
2. Women play a major role and make environmentally crucial choices in key areas of production as well as consumption affecting the environment in both rural and urban areas. Women must be engaged in environmentally sound action at the local level and in action which promotes the sustainable use of natural resources at all levels. Women's experiences and expertise of safeguarding the environment while at the same time seeking to ensure adequate and sustainable resource allocations within households and communities must be acknowledged and incorporated into decision-making.