“la parole exportée”

I am so grateful to Jeremiah Owyang for conducting a video interview with Spanish-speaking users about the Spanish translation of Facebook, and blogging about it, and inviting comments on his blog here.

Mr. Owyang is a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, a professional whom we cannot suspect of being biased towards our profession more than any other. He is looking at a product and trying to see if it is a good product. I cannot personally comment on the quality or relevance of the Spanish version of Facebook, and I will have to wait till we get the French version.

The general trend nowadays is to provide translation for free, calling upon ‘crowdsourcing,’ and generally making users happy to participate in a collaborative effort. But ‘voting on translations’ does not solve quality-related issues, it reinforces them, because there is no authority or responsibility. I have already blogged on the subject in a previous post, and written comments on several articles.

As a professional translator, with a university degree (3 years), specific vocational training in translation (2 years), and extended professional experience in the private sector (30 years), I can tell that there is no such thing as ‘free’ translation, especially for commercial purposes. Why? Because there is more at stake than just producing something that vaguely resembles the original.

All things considered, I am wondering sometimes whether we translators should stop holding on to the concept of ‘quality’; what is at stake is something more elusive. Who cares about ‘quality’ when anyone with a good, even a standard, knowledge of English nowadays feels that they can translate just about anything? Why bother about quality?

But professional translation is more than simply trying your hand at translation. It entails a thorough knowledge of both languages that takes time and effort to maintain. What we continue to call good translation applies the vocabulary used in that particular industry, is written in the appropriate style, and communicates the author’s intentions without altering them to suit the translator’s taste, so it requires ethics; a long time ago, a fellow translator was asked to review a translation from Spanish of an article that a famous writer had authored for a literary magazine. The magazine editor’s suspicions had been raised by the fact that the translation was much shorter than the original and asked this friend to check. ‘Oh,’ said the first translator when she was challenged, ‘he was repeating things, so I just left them out.’

Most importantly, the translation should not be a source of ambiguity and your client must be able to confidently use it. Must I mention that there should be no typos, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes?

I would even argue that translating social networking tools is probably much more tricky than translating a user’s guide for industrial machinery. There are so many implications, in terms of the language used, the underlying meaning, slang, etc. My own children would probably provide very different translations of some of the language, from my own.

Are all these dimensions taken onboard? We’ll see with the French version.

In the meantime, enjoy the video.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Translation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.