“la parole exportée”

The dilemma:

I’m working on a monthly translation project with which I have a long-standing love-hate relationship, even though my client thinks that I’m managing rather well.

Much of the English copy that ends up on a translator’s desk was not drafted with French translation in view. In fact, on closer inspection, you will find that the copy wasn’t drafted with any of the other major languages of the world in mind. French, Spanish, German, Russian, to name a few, all happen to be languages that use more, and often longer words, than English.

This is fine when there are no space restrictions, and the translator is free to translate.

But things are less rosy when space restrictions are involved, for instance for headings, or copy intended for websites, or publications of any sort.

Maybe the English or American writer was vaguely aware that some translation would be involved at a later stage, but they had to include a given amount of data in their copy. Maybe their own copy was too long to start with, and they had a hard time fitting it in, and they have used up all 500 characters.

What can you do? Throw a tantrum, send an angry e-mail to your client, refuse to do the work unless they make the copy shorter for your sake?

That’s where professionals have to stick their necks out. Their reputation is on the line.

When a simple solution like nudging the font size a notch down behind your client’s back isn’t an option — ending up perhaps with a font size that’s so small that readers have to use magnifying glasses, or move on to easier-to-read articles — there’s no other way but to:

Take risks.

Taking risks is not easy, yet this is what professionals are paid for, whether we like it or not.

In this particular situation, the risks I take involve:

1. Deleting all unnecessary info (I didn’t say data). I know who the copy will be read by, the degree of detail required, possible additional props like photos, etc., so if for instance the copy includes a product model number and its extended name in 4 or 5 words, I translate the full name once, then I drop it in the rest of the text, using only the model number. That’s at least 20 characters saved per instance, more in some cases.

2. Make the text more readable. A couple of examples:

In technical documents written in the USA, product names tend to be repeated several times, sometimes within one sentence. This doesn’t really go down well in terms of style in the target language, at least in French. So using it once, and replacing it, as appropriate, by ‘it,’ ‘this,’ ‘this model,’ ‘this feature’ makes for a lighter style (and saves characters again).

Depending on the type of copy, again (this is all very context-dependent), two related sentences can be joined and a little cleaning up can be performed in order to make the relationship more obvious, in less words.

The translator should consider all options that make the reader’s task easier, of course with their client’s agreement. But slavishly translating everything without respect to readers is not translation, at least in this particular case.

Here the key words are ‘context-dependent,’ ‘as appropriate,’ ‘knowing who the reader is,’ etc. All this involves a good knowledge of the end-reader, and a direct relationship with your client.

Tags: translation challenges

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 12:08 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.