|
|
(Reprinted from the January 1996 issue of the JAT Bulletin.)
I have heard many experienced and highly competent translators express their frustration with the lack of freedom they are afforded in their translations, the insult of having their work pored over by individuals who cannot fully understand the source language, and the butchering of their definitively perfect and masterful renderings into the target language. As a translator who works both in house and out house (sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally), these complaints strike a common chord. I have certainly experienced and expressed more than my share of grousing and grumbling over revisions to my "final" copy.
Nevertheless, I find these corrections and my resulting frustrations becoming less and less frequent. Why is this the case? One reason is that I no longer view myself as a professional. This brings me to the core of this article. Translators are not professionals, at least in the traditional sense of the term.
I fully expect to be criticized for this statement, if not murdered at the next JAT meeting (maybe I should undergo plastic surgery and burn off my fingerprints?). My point, however, is not as insulting as it may seem. Do translators take their jobs seriously? Yes, at least the ones I know, and certainly the translators who can keep, build and maintain their client base over many years. Are translators conscientious? We are not just conscientious, we are veritable pack rats of information. I know of very few "professionals" who spend the (non-paid) time a good translator spends in pouring through manuals, taking notes while watching television, searching for reference texts and building data bases. Do translators make mistakes? Yes, unfortunately we do.1 Mistakes are intrinsic to our occupation. While most translators that I know focus on working in a specific field of knowledge, be it law, medicine, music or engineering, we cannot obtain the specialized knowledge of a true "professional" in any given occupation, and we cannot acquire the language capacity of a well educated "native speaker" in our source language.2 In this sense we differ from the real experts or "professionals" who are actively working in the areas in which we translate. Thus it behooves us to have considerable humility when undertaking the tasks we are assigned.
We also differ from "professionals" in another, more basic sense. Traditionally, the term "professional" was limited to the three learned professions, i.e., law, medicine and theology. These three occupations stand apart from other occupations in several important respects. First they deal predominately with human calamities. People go to doctors when they are sick. No one goes to a lawyer without a problem. Much of a minister's duties are taken up with parishioners facing deep personal issues. Because of the importance of these "professions," human society has long provided special privileges to, and placed stringent restrictions on, their practitioners.
Key among these restrictions are the prohibitions against outright pursuit of financial gain and the instruction that a "professional" has a duty to give his "client" what the client needs, rather than what the client wants.
One can argue back and forth as to how well the three professions meet these standards. My point, however, is that the conceptual basis for our occupation differs from that of a "professional," and as such our attitude towards our clients, and indeed our product, necessarily differs. As translators we have no duty to advise our client against his or her wishes, and we cannot quarantine a client for suffering from an infectious disease. We also have no requirement to perform pro-bono work, although most translators that I know have on occasion worked for free.
If translation is not a profession, then is it a discipline? I do not think this definition fits either. Few of us are academics, and even those of us who are would probably admit that a translator doesn't really do "research," at least in the sense understood in other disciplines. We don't discover new knowledge and we don't reveal new insights that are not already available (at least to those who can read our source language).
Many have referred to translation as being an art rather than a science. Nevertheless, under the modern understanding of art, the audience must at least attempt to understand the artist. This has allowed development of avant-garde art, atonal music and a host of other new art forms which initially met with scorn from the unwashed masses. The translation industry, however, affords no such respect for the translator. If the translator cannot explain the original text for his audience, he or she is a failure--pure and simple.
If translation is not a profession, a discipline or an art, then what is it? The answer, I think, is that translation is a craft. We are craftsmen --職人. The last of the guilds of skilled laborers who once dominated pre-industrialized and early industrial economies. We are similar to weavers, potters, lacquerers, masons, wainwrights and tailors.
As craftsmen our clients have the final say in the product. The case is different for an attorney, for example, who may be disbarred for following a client's wishes against the ethics rules mandated by the local bar association. As craftsmen, therefore, we must verify client desires before the fact, and adjust and tailor our product to meet the final requests that our clients inevitably make. We cannot view the act of translation either as a mass produced product--"Hey, I met your specs. If your specs are wrong, that's not my department lady"--or as a revelation of knowledge and creation from on high, which only we the initiated can render--"I don't care if your editor says to use 'owing to' instead of 'due to.' He ain't JTF accredited" (i.e., he hasn't passed the bar).
A clear understanding of our role makes the human interaction aspects of a translator much easier to grasp. We are craftsmen in a specialized craft. We adjust our "specs" to client desires, at least to the limits of safety (a good carpenter will not build a house that falls down the next day, regardless of what his customer wants). We use 対面販売 rather than mass marketing.3 And we must follow up after the product is initially presented. A few unsolicited calls to the client after sending a translation can be very instructive and can save hours of nitpicking and lost business on other minor issues.
By behaving as a craftsman, i.e., a skilled servant, we can avoid most, if not all, of the initial problems of the troublesome client, and indeed build a base of stable purchasers which we can serve and which can maintain us for years.
1 Note the use of pour/pore in the previous sentence. This error was in my original article in the JAT Bulletin, and I have left it in this version as a reminder to myself.
2 Source language here means the language from which one translates, rather than the target language which means the language into which one translates. There is an edited version of this article on the web which mistakenly "corrected" source language to native language. That indeed would be insulting, and aside from other changes to my article, it struck me as odd that a practicing translator would be unaware of this term of art.
3 対面販売 was a buzzword at the time that I wrote this article. If I were to write it over again I would probably use 提案型営業 instead.