“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.

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…

I’ve just written one important letter and I feel better now.

Last week, I mentioned an assignment that was promising to go rather badly.

It did go quite badly in the end, and I certainly have been mis-used, not to say ab-used.

But rather than making a big fuss about it, once I had mentally and physically recovered from the incident, my decision was to turn this into an opportunity.

My feeling is that the organization had absolutely no clue as to what interpreters are for (apart from translating). I am saying ‘my feeling’. Even if it is misguided, I am acting on that feeling.

So I wrote a very nice Thank you letter for all the good things, adding a memento in 3 parts on the proper hiring and use of conference interpreters: Needs Analysis, Technical Resources, Contracts and Documents.

The Needs Analysis section is, not surprisingly so, the longest; looking back, that was the source of all the misunderstandings that ensued.

One of my regular clients had one of its staff invited to speak at a conference. I don’t usually interpret for that person directly, so I was not aware of her actual knowledge of French.

My brief, on which my understanding was based, was to assist her for her presentation, or rather for the questions following her presentation, with a last-minute add-on, a press conference. All this was fine, and I made a proposal to the organizers on that basis. In other words, I was hired by the organizers of the conference, not by my client who was just a guest.

But that wasn’t the only need, hence the problem. My client was part of a panel, and most importantly she was to stay all the time. That was never mentioned.

I could have refused to cooperate in the end. You have to think fast in those circumstances, and my very good business relation with my client, and the personal relation that has developed over the years, meant it was difficult for me to storm off. So I stayed. I also stayed because I was ashamed on behalf of the organizers. (Stupid of me, I know!)

The Technical Resources issue is an extension of the initial defective needs analysis.

The Contract/confirmation bit was another oversight on the organizer’s part, but they did sort it out quickly.

I may or may not work again with these organizers. After all, their conference only takes place once a year and I am not even looking beyond now. But I felt that a little education was necessary. Translators and interpreters are not bilingual secretaries with oversized egoes and remunerations. Our work is recognized as difficult and for most people, it is impossible. But because it is not very well known, it is easy to abuse us, and we have to be very careful about that.