Meetings of Minds Only

Recently I encountered a most unusual situation.

I was sitting in the park watching my son on the swing and enjoying a late afternoon breeze, when my cellphone rang. It was a woman from a non-profit organization in need of a translation of an important report to an international body. She received my number from another client and I had come recommended.

All was going smoothly until she asked if I could come into their offices for a meeting.

That question really threw me off guard...

"A meeting..." I stuttered. "I don't know..."

I can honestly say that the last time I had a meeting with a translation client was August 2004. And that was only a formality to get me some sort of security clearance at a government office.

My usually smooth professional manner deserted me as, while watching my son swinging higher and higher, I grasped at mental straws in the attempt to formulate a response to this strange question.

Eventually, I stuttered out a yes. Yes, I could come in for a meeting.

"What does that mean - would you stay for an eight-hour meeting? Would you come for more than one meeting?"

"No. Just one meeting, maximum two hours," I said, mentally calculating my dwindling profit margin as I took into account the commute. "You know what, before we have a meeting, why don't you send me a short translation to do? I think you'll find that we may not even need a meeting."

This put her off a bit and the conversation soon ended. I did not get the job.

Afterward, when I had time to reflect, I came to the conclusion that I was, in fact, not willing to go in for a meeting, unless they were going to pay me by the hour for my time spent with them.

Face-to-face meetings are not a normal part of a translator's role. I would probably go to a meeting to prepare for a large job that was already guaranteed to me, but only if I had determined that it was really essential.

Since translators are paid by the word, and not by the hour, time spent commuting and meeting is basically volunteer work. And I'm still not convinced that meetings are useful to either the translator or the client.

If the client needs reassurance of the translator's competence, let them ask for a sample and have it evaluated. If the translator needs more information in order to complete the job properly, let them go through the research process and ask the client specific questions by phone or email. A meeting will solve none of these problems.

But enough of my diatribe on the futility of meetings. I want to qualify all this by saying that we have to understand our client's perspective before we get all worked up at their unreasonable requests.

Besides knowing nothing about translation industry protocol and not understanding that we just don't do meetings, this client came from the non-profit world where nothing is planned, decided, or implemented without half a dozen meetings every step of the way. She probably could not conceive of anything so rash as my getting the job done without a meeting or two (perhaps even an eight-hour one???)

Having done a lot of work for non-profit organizations, I know this mind-set well. Business clients might also imagine at first that a meeting is in order, but when you explain that you can save them time and money and do the job just as well without one, they are quick to forgo. Not every non-profit is so focused on efficiency.

But don't lecture them about it. Simply tell them that it is not standard in the industry, as it does not help in the translation process. If they still want to see your face and you really want that job, you can offer to meet with them as a courtesy for a limited time-slot. (Just make sure that they actually plan to give you the job before you set out.) If it is not worth your while, then you should politely ask them to pay for your time and travel expenses.

Otherwise, you may unwittingly find yourself running a non-profit organization.

Translation is Writing Without the Writer's Block

The title of this posting is a line that I often tell people who are interested in studying translation. It always gets a warm response because people who are drawn to translation usually love writing.

Translation and writing have much in common, but in translation you don't have to expend all that creative energy developing your idea and helping it find its shape in print. Instead you leave that part to someone else, and you just do the writing.

If you are going to be a translator you have to love writing and you have to be able to do it well.

Translation is writing.

Translation is writing without the writer's block (TM Naomi Elbinger 2009!)

How a Rush Job Becomes a Breeze

What is a rush job in translation?
This is an important question, since it is standard in the industry to add a surcharge to your regular rate for a "rush job." It is accepted that the average pro translator translates about 2,000 words a day. We've all done more than this for important jobs but I personally don't think it's realistic to do much more on a daily basis. Quality may begin to suffer and, more importantly, we should not forget that translators are human beings who are subject to eye strain, RSI, backaches and burn-out.
Translation is a job that demands intense concentration on a single task for extended periods. The human brain is simply not capable of putting in 10-hour workdays in the long run.
Most pro translators are very comfortable with a daily output of 2,000 fully polished words and many would call this a breeze. (This is true even if they are not using CATs.)
Rookie translators, on the other hand, almost faint for when they hear this. They may be averaging just 200 words per hour, and they find each word an intellectual strain, so they cannot translate for many hours in a row.
How do you do it? they ask, in a state of fear and awe.
I have tried to explain to students many times how this works, but I never managed to describe it so well as the following passage which I read recently in Becoming a Translator by Douglas Robinson.

At first glance the desires to translate faster and translate reliably might seem to be at odds with one another. One commonsensical assumption says that the faster you do something, the more likely you are to make mistakes; the more slowly you work, the more likely that work is to be reliable. The reliable translator shouldn't make (major) mistakes, so s/he shouldn't try to translate fast.

But increased speed, at least up to a point, really only damages reliability when you are doing something new or unfamiliar, something that requires concentration, which always takes time. "Old" and "familiar" actions, especially habitual actions, can be performed both quickly and reliably because habit takes over. You're late in the morning, so you brush your teeth, tie your shoes, throw on your coat, grab your keys and wallet or purse and run for the door, start the car and get on the road, all in about two minutes - and you don't forget anything, you don't mistie your shoes, grab a fork and spoon instead of your keys, because you've done all these things so many times before that your body knows what to do, and does it.

And there are important parallels between this "bodily memory" and translation. Experienced translators are fast because they have translated so much that it often seems as if their "brain" isn't doing the translating - their fingers are. They recognize a familiar source-language structure and barely pause before their fingers are racing across the keyboard, rendering it into a well-worn target-language structural equivalent, fitted with lexical items that seem to come to them automatically without any conscious thought or logical analysis.

Thank you, Prof. Robinson, I really enjoyed this description of how I, and many translators who been doing this for years, experience the process.
If you are not at this point yet and find that every job feels like a "rush job," take heart. Just keep translating and one day you too will find that 2,000 words is a breeze.

Eating the Void

Today I went to visit a neighbor across the street who has a big shesek tree in her front yard, which is currently laden with ripe fruit. While biting into a juicy, sweet shesek, I had a true translator moment. I realized that I was eating a cultural void!

I know that shesek can be accurately translated into English as loquat. But lexical precision does not fill the cultural void, because in the part of the world I live in, shesek are ubiquitous and unremarkable, while in most parts of the Western world, they are exotic, if not unknown. The word "shesek" means something very specific to those who use it, while the word "loquat" is meaningless to most readers of US English.

Let's say I was translating a Hebrew story that casually mentions a man who ate a shesek. If I translate it to say that the man ate a loquat, readers may begin imagining him eating kumquats or loganberries or pawpaws, or whatever irrelevant tropical fruit association comes to mind. In addition, the mention of this mysterious fruit may add a hint of exoticism to the story which the author did not intend. The author did not mean the episode of the loquat to be at all evocative or remarkable.

In such a case, I, as the translator, may decide to avoid the void.

I may well take the license to write that the man ate an apple or pear.

I call that eating the void...

And this particular void tastes really good.

Avoid the Void!

One of the common hurdles translators encounter in the textual steeplechase we call "work" is voids.

What is a void? In a nutshell, voids are terms that cannot be translated because no cultural or lexical reference to them exists in the target language.

To give a funny example, when speaking to a fellow Australian recently, he told me that many years ago he had attended a certain person's "barmy." Since I am familiar with that dialect, I knew he was referring to a bar mitzvah celebration. But let's say a client hired me to translate this interview into general US English. This term, as a both a lexical and cultural void, would present a translation problem, as detailed below:

1. I could translate it as "bar mitzvah," but thereby lose his slangy, colloquial tone, since there is no equivalent slang term for barmy in US English - this is the lexical void.
   
2. I could leave in "barmy," and then put the following in a footnote or parenthesis: "Australian Jewish slang for bar mitzvah" - yet these options are clunky, distracting and inappropriate for many contexts, such as magazine articles or web content.
   
3. And what if this text is intended for a very general audience, including readers in Timbuktu who don't understand the concept of a bar mitzvah? Due to this cultural void, I might have to forgo the tone altogether and just focus on making the concept understood to some limited degree ("Jewish coming of age ritual marked at age 13" - how's that for a literary clunker? On the brighter side, at least I get paid by the world.)

As you can see, there is no truly satisfactory solution to the above translation problem. This is often the case with voids.

Often the best way to deal with translation voids is to avoid the problem all together. For example, a former student wrote to me about such a problem recently. She was translating a poster for an organization that helps the elderly to live independently. The poster was advertising their service of selling adult diapers and other hygiene products at their "mercaz tetzuga." This term would translate literally as "display center" or maybe, at a stretch, as "showroom."

I hope you are immediately sensing the lexical void that is lurking behind this translation problem. In Hebrew, such a service may be known euphemistically as "mercaz tetzuga" but in English, "adult diaper display center" or "showroom" sounds like the beginning of a lowbrow comedy skit.

After some discussion, we agreed that there was no getting around this void. Instead, we avoided the problem with a creative new title: "Special Sale for Seniors."

That's a completely non-literal translation but we felt it works.

What do you think?