In which I put myself in the shoes of one of my most hated enemies.

I have an issue with translators. Not the automated kind, far away from the Babelfish though they may be. Those are just stupid machines that don’t know better because the geeks among us haven’t come up a way to deal computationally with natural language yet. However, we also don’t have machines fully act as doctors, artists, you name it and we still manage to diagnose people, fill up museums and galleries and do what is it that whatever you named it does by using humans proficient in those tasks. Likewise, we have humans that are supposed to be proficient in translating texts from one language to another. It is those translators that I have an issue with.

To clarify further: I have no problem with the act of translation itself. Since I am only proficient in two languages, three at most, I am, in fact, very grateful that translators exist and have done their thing to books which I would otherwise not be able to read. At its best, a translation is an invisible layer that allows the author to seamlessly reach the reader.

My issues are with the spots and scratches that appear in many English to Portuguese translations*. There have been novels that I couldn’t continue reading until I got the original version, so bad were the glaring translation mistakes. Mistakes that sometimes completely changed the meaning of the sentence and for which a quick internet search for the phrasal verb in question was all it would take to correct them.

It got to the point where I actively avoid any translation into Portuguese. Maybe because there is a bigger market, maybe because I don’t know enough to spot the errors, translations into English seem to be of better quality and are my choice when I find myself linguistically challenged.

Recently, however, I was asked to translate an English text that I helped composed in a small way. Giving it to someone else was a problem because there was no one else. Also, there was a girl saying “please please can you do it” and I’m a sucker for that. It was time see if I could to walk the walk as well as I talked the talk.

For most words where I was unsure about its direct translation, a quick search in the dictionary and/or Google would clear things up. Other were not so straightforward and the final version may not have the same exact meaning, but it’s the one that I think fits best, short of writing down the whole definition. As for phrase structure, sometimes it took some time to think about some other way to write that was the same sentence with translated words, but eventually everything fell into place. On the whole I am happy with this exercise. It was done quickly, neatly and made me put myself on the line on an issue where I usually just fire away criticism.**

The bottom line? I’ll still get frustrated and complain about bad translations. It is a great responsibility to take someone else’s words and reinvent them. On top of that, especially if the source material is good, poorly translated passages stand out and cloud one’s enjoyment of the whole. However, I’ll also have more respect for the good translations I find. I reworked a two-page text that I had helped shape, had access to the original author anytime I needed and still ran into some difficulties. I can only try to imagine what it is like to translate a doorstop novel whose author died ages ago.

*I mean book translations. For the sake of brevity and to avoid the use of profanity, no comment will be made about subtitle translations other than the following understatement: the median quality of a subtitle translation is on par with the Fast Food Song by the Fast Food Rockers (google it at your own peril).

**Some would argue translation is just one of many such issues.