Please “just translate it”
In this blog post, our very first one, we explain why there is no such thing as just a translation, what decisions we are forced to take while translating and why they sometimes drive us mad.
In performing our day-to-day translation and localisation work, what we aim for is to communicate the essence and tone of the source text and make it sound perfectly natural in the target language. Needless to say, this can never be achieved by a mechanical word-for-word translation. As Viktor Golyshev, a famous English-to-Russian literary translator, remarked in a public lecture, “one is translating words, while what one actually needs to do is to inhabit the text and move there”. That is so true! In our work, whether copywriting or translating, we really come to “inhabit” the world of stern lumbermen tending forest stands, or of young investors willing to invest into an innovative financial service, or of journalists striving to enhance their skills, or of someone else again.
No matter what kind of place we have to inhabit, it is important that the responsibility we assume for what we do is not only matched by our professional experiences, but also resonates with our personal interests. For instance, when localising texts for a network of gyms, it is not enough simply to know that these gyms exist; it is also crucial to understand what overcoming oneself means, to have undergone this process, to know its taste. That is exactly the reason why we most probably wouldn’t undertake a translation of the Bible — or of Homer’s epic poems, for that matter.
So, having got acquainted with the topic, we managed to “inhabit” this new place and are now slowly but surely moving through the text. And here a new difficulty of translating awaits us — people think differently in different languages. This is why it can at times be very hard to fit a long, ornate passage of Russian into the more straightforward English language. At the same time, three or four grammatical modifiers in a row, which look and sound totally OK in English, risk seeming outright ridiculous in Russian. What can one do then? Well, this is exactly how inhabiting a text works — it is only “from the inside” that the right decisions can be taken with regard to the meaning and purpose of a particular sentence, paragraph, or the text as a whole. Only from this point of view can it become clear which aspects of the source text have to be downplayed or forsaken, and where some new details have to be introduced.
In our work with business copy this problem becomes most conspicuous in relation to components of brand verbal identity such as brand descriptions; slogans; and mission, vision and values statements of companies. The degree of concision and high level of abstraction in copy of this kind can sometimes drive you mad. Quite often, one has not only to communicate the essence of what is said in a particular tone, but also squeeze it into a limited number of characters so that the graphic designers can fit the copy into the layout for a webpage, brochure or packaging. And if, as most often happens, the Russian version comes out 20–30% longer than the English original, this will in no way solve the client’s problem, regardless of how brilliantly the localisation is performed.
So here they are — not “just” translators, but heroes of localisation (!). Having inhabited the terrain of their client’s business and made friends with the target audience, they are now sitting in the shining armour of their knowledge and patience and, one after another, taking endlessly complicated decisions. Who are they really? Well, probably they are us.
