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JAT Bulletin 175, October 1999
(Japan Times 掲載記事をご本人のご厚意により転載させて頂きました)
After having translated Japanese into English for too many years to remember, I get tired of hearing translators say that translating in one field is not the same as in another. Well, of course it is. But not in any important way.
If those who make such statements would try to explain logically and in detail what they mean, they would see for themselves how weak their position is.
Apart from the difference between machine and human translating, there is just one translating process. A J/E translator reads Japanese (source language) and writes English (target language). The best J/E translators, no matter what field they work in, know what has to be done, and know how to do it.
Sure, there are different approaches to translating. There's the age-old argument about whether to translate literally or freely, for example, although that argument applies mainly to the translation of literature. In business translating it's more likely the customer who will decide whether a translation should be literal or not.
The approach to translating literature definitely requires a special mentality. Webster defines literature as “… writings in prose or verse having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest.”
What Alice McDermott (“Charming Billy,” etc.) and Toni Morrison (“Paradise,” etc.) write, therefore, is literature; what John D. MacDonald (“Deadly Welcome,” etc.) and Louis L'Amour (“Monument Rock,” etc.) write is not. I'm not saying MacDonald and L'Amour don't write well. I'm saying their work is not literature.
In literature, the authors are writers. By definition, therefore, they choose each word, each phrase, each punctuation mark, with extreme care, particularly if writing verse. But even when translating prose, the translator must consider not only word meaning (including the meaning of and origin of the names of persons or places) and punctuation meaning, but also word choice (etymology, shape of letters, vowel sounds, alliteration, and so forth), length of sentences, position of main point in a paragraph, and on and on. Literary works often contain symbolism as well, and, who knows, it's even possible that the shape of the space on a page not covered by writing has some arcane significance.
Because of the care with which good writers practice their craft, if a person translating literature decides to cut or add a word, or to moveparts of a sentence or paragraph around so that they relate differently in English compared with Japanese, there must be especially good reasons for doing so. And the shorter the piece, say a short story compared with a 400-page novel, the more difficult it is to change anything.
In non-literary translation, on the other hand, the original author is seldom a writer, so the writing is not, so to speak, engraved in stone. The translator thus has far greater freedom in deleting or adding words or phrases, in moving around parts of sentences, or even whole sentences, to express in English the meaning expressed in the Japanese original.
Putting aside the translation of literature, which, as I said, requires a special approach, let me mention non-literary translation, and break it into the translation of technical and non-technical materials. Non-literary materials account for a quite high percentage of the work that keeps J/E translators busy -- maybe 95% or more.
Technical materials cover everything from semiconductors to mechanical and electrical engineering, nuclear power plants, automobile engines, medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and 50 other areas I can copy from an encyclopedia's table of contents. Patents can also be quite technical, as can legal documents, and articles or papers on economics, financial markets, or the environment.
Non-technical materials include annual reports, executive speeches, news releases, information reports, general newspaper/magazine clippings, company brochures, and other PR-related materials.
The scientific approach to understanding translating focuses on describing and explaining the process of translating. This process is the same for translating all the different kinds of materials mentioned above, including literature. The approach may differ, but the process is the same, a process that takes place in the brain, in human memory.
The relative ease or difficulty of a translation is a problem in a different dimension from the translation process. An executive's speech may be difficult because of subjective elements in it; a patent may be difficult because of redundancy; a legal document may be difficult because its wording covers every possibility for using, say, a software product.
These difficulties, however, go with the turf. That's what I mean by saying a good translator knows what has to be done and knows how to do it. Translators specializing in economics won't usually be able to translate medical-related materials. They don't have the specific knowledge of the medical field. But when translating economics they may be conducting the translation process superbly. It's just that they cannot apply their translating expertise outside economics until they learn the new vocabulary in both the source and target languages.