“la parole exportée”

In a previous post, I mentioned Neil Kramer’s excellent and fun idea of getting people to interview each other, and publish the result in their blogs. The Great Interview Experiment is still on, I believe, so if you are interested in participating, just head here: http://www.citizenofthemonth.com/2008/01/18/the-great-interview-experiment/

So here is my interview, based on a series of questions sent to me by Sarah of http://sarah.bloghorn.com

1. You seem to really enjoy your profession, but if you could go back to school and start over, would you choose the same or something else?

The same, definitely. At the age of 15, it dawned on me that you could learn a foreign language and communicate with people from a different country. Until then, English was just an abstract school subject. Communication means a lot to me and I believe that it is much more complicated and difficult than it is made to appear these days. Machines cannot take in or produce all the fine nuances of human diversity. So that has never deserted me. Later, of course, I found that reality does not always support your ideal as you dreamed it. I did go through a crisis some time ago, but the dream is still alive, or I would have another job now. I recognize that in today’s world, sticking to one profession for your entire life is not necessarily seen an advantage. You are expected to be able to swiftly change lives, jobs… that is why it is important to keep the dream alive.

2. In your opinion, what is the best thing about France?

Paris. Paris is seen as a romantic city. I have a slightly different view: Paris (and I live in the suburbs) can be very hard. A poet coined this sentence, almost 50 years ago: Métro, Boulot, Dodo (subway, work, sleep… The actual quotation is longer.) That sums up the lives of millions of people in and around Paris, not to mention those who are without a job, or a home, or both.

If you come as a visitor, however, my suggestion is to take a cruise on the Seine by night, it is quite cheap if you don’t buy one of these romantic dinners, and you will see the old buildings along the river, all lit up, and if you are at the foot of the Eiffel Tower at the right time (on the hour, for a few minutes), you will see it twinkle in the dark. How uncanny that Gustave Eiffel had this strange thing built to showcase France’s engineering expertise at the time; now it is just a tourist attraction, albeit a very valuable one.

But I would also like to recommend Provence, in the South of France, with its totally different atmosphere, a different way of life, I love the dry smells and the sounds of Summer, the lavender, open air markets with dozens of varieties of vegetables and fruit and cut flowers, all the colors, olive trees, and the cicadas ’singing’ in the fields, the long evenings, taking in the night, listening, watching the stars.

3. How has blogging impacted your life?

Believe it or not, blogging is quite challenging for me. Spending a lifetime translating other people’s ideas, good or bad, has robbed me of the habit of putting my own ideas on paper; more importantly blogging has made me realize that I now prefer the spoken word. I used to write a lot when I was very young. Now, I listen to the radio all the time, I watch videos on my computer, and I don’t take the time to write for myself. With translation, the only creativity that you are allowed is within very strict boundaries. You are not delivering your own message; you are doing your best to convey someone else’s message. In other words, you are following the path laid by the author. When I started this blog, it was difficult for me to focus; my ideas were running all over the place, there was no way for me to keep them contained anymore. It was so weird!

4. What do you hope to accomplish in the next 5 years?

French society, and I with it, is going through a major change, some kind of revolution and a break-up from the accepted ways that came with the end of World War II. I was hoping to retire in about 6-7 years, but this is not likely to happen. With an ageing population and the retirement issue in France, my generation and those after us are going to have to work longer and retire later. So in the next 5 years I do not expect any major change, and I will probably be busy working, and seeing my younger child through her studies.

My vision, and my purpose in life, is one that has been developing for the past 5 years or so. I am looking for a way to provide good, free translation for the charities I want to support. I haven’t found a satisfactory business model yet, in order to do this and earn a living at the same time, but I’m working on it.

5. What is your favorite travel destination and why?

I don’t actually have one favorite travel destination. As a child, in the 60s, my parents took me almost everywhere in Europe, it was quite an achievement at the time. Later, I traveled a little further, but I don’t take extended holidays as a rule. So let me offer you a mosaic of the destinations that impressed me most: Algeria and the Sahara Desert, Alaska, Moscow many years ago, Niagara Falls, Manhattan… My next destination is going to be, some time in the near future… Bangladesh.

6. Are you the same person online as in person? How do you differ?

I hope to be the same person everywhere. I enjoy being alive, even though I’m a quiet person. But I am more outspoken than before, I have a responsibility to try and make things better, if I can. I am past the stage now that I can just be an on-looker and get on with my own life without thinking of the implications.

7. What is the strangest job you have ever had?

I can’t think of a strange job as such. But let me tell you one anecdote. There is one district in Paris that didn’t have a good reputation. One year, I was interpreting for a group of foreign members of Parliament investigating the issue of public safety, and we were taken there. No interpretation during the visit, so the group was walking along and I fell behind, having a chat with one M.P., commenting on how empty and quiet the district was by day, discussing the strange goings-on at night, when I noticed that we were followed at some distance by two rather dirty and suspicious-looking individuals. When I mentioned them to the M.P. who was walking with me, he responded in a casual tone: “These? They are undercover cops making sure that we are safe.” I swear that I had never seen policemen in such a state before…

8. Have you ever been paid for any of your blog posts? If so, did you contact the advertiser, or did they contact you?

No, and quite frankly, I wouldn’t even know how to do it. This has to do with earning my living by translating, not writing.

9. What are you most proud of?

Mmmm… I don’t really know, I am not a proud person in general. My two daughters are certainly who, not what, I am most proud of.

10. Do you edit or proofread your blog before posting? Why or why not?

I do a lot of editing and proofreading before and after. I am hopeless. My ideas run ahead of me and when I stop and look back, there are all these typos, awkward sentences, etc. to clean up, because I type too fast. English is a second language for me and I have to edit and prune typically one half of each post. I write, and then I cut and I cut. The end-result is still spontaneous, but better written.

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This is completely off-topic, but because I work for children’s charities, I feel involved, in a way.

If you want to find out more, click on the badge in the sidebar. This will take you to Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian’s website on Congenital Heart Defects.

‘Congenital Heart Defects (CHD) are a lethal constellation of birth defects of the heart that affect millions of newborn infants and children worldwide; a killer that claims thousands of lives every year. Eight of every 1000 children born alive (0.8%) will have some form of congenital heart defect.’

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.

I chanced upon this fun exercise a few weeks ago, and I jumped in immediately:
http://www.citizenofthemonth.com/2008/01/18/the-great-interview-experiment/

What I liked about it is that you are interviewed by the person immediately ahead of you in the list of comments, and you interview the person immediately behind you, there is no complicated selection, you are where you are in the queue and you are talking to the person next to you. In other words, totally random.

It was my turn to interview Ingrid from ‘ice cream is nice cream‘.

My questions are further down this post, but Ingrid’s replies are here, under ‘the great interview experiment: gaze at my navel’ (her title!).

I feel that the material belongs to her, so I am not using it here. She is a talented young woman, and she has turned the exercise into a brilliant piece. Not only is she a very fast player (my God, the ink in the questions was hardly dry that she had already completed all the answers!!!), she also writes beautifully and she is full of verve, with a lively style. Enjoy!

Here is my list of questions. Feel free to use them, or perhaps try and answer them privately.

1. Your blog posts seem to embrace many different topics and styles. Tell us: What makes you tick in life?
2. How long have you been blogging? How did it happen?
3. You describe yourself as an impatient kind of person. Are your referring to specific cases?
4. Could you share with us how you write your posts?
5. If you could see yourself let’s say 5 years from now, would you still express your creativity by blogging?
6. Are you trying to achieve something specific through your blog, or is it purely for fun?
7. Do you feel your blog reflects your true personality?
8. Do you share your blog? Do you advertise it at all?
9. Has blogging changed you in any way?
10.Would you encourage anyone to blog?

I suppose I should start by answering my own questions…