- Education and Science
Difficulties Involved in Language Translation
When translating from one language to another, elements of the original text can be lost in translation. Anyone who has attempted translating something will notice that a translation can result in sometimes odd
- Education and Science
Difficulties Involved in Language Translation
When translating from one language to another, elements of the original text can be lost in translation. Anyone who has attempted translating something will notice that a translation can result in sometimes odd and awkward language.
Poetic and otherwise 'pretty' structure of the original text isn't all that can be lost. In fact, an entire message can be completely altered.
As follows are a few of the various ways in which a text can be altered, reasons why they're altered, and how this is unavoidable.
Losing the Meaning
As a gift from a cousin who, at the time, was studying abroad in Hungary, I received a small wooden plaque with Garfield painted on it along with some Hungarian text. Garfield, known for his witty/sarcastic complaints, is pictured sitting at a desk and appears to be bored out of his mind. The text around the witty cat is indecipherable to me. It reads, “Hajszolom a tudást. De gyorsabb nálam.”
A foreign exchange student from Hungary, Mariann, who was staying with us, helped me learn the meaning behind the cryptic message on the plaque. Mariann chuckled when she read the plaque and then explained to me that there was no good way to explain what it meant in English.
She gave me a long, beat-around-the-bush explanation of the message, but at this point, it was only vaguely funny: “I'm trying to chase learning, but it's faster than me.”
Playing Telephone: Translating a Translation
The above isn't the only example of meaning getting lost in translation. There are literally hundreds of different versions of the Bible, with many translations touting that it's the best translation.
The Bible, like many written works, is full of metaphors, slang tied to the culture at the time of its writing, bits of poetry, and even strings actually meant to be taken literally. When metaphors, slang, poetry, and literal strings appear in modern works, at least there is a living, breathing native speaker around to sort out any issues. When an ancient document containing these elements, is translated, it's a recipe for disaster! This effect can be worsened when a language is layered on top of another (a translation of a translation.)
A number of modern-day translations branch right off the Greek version of the Bible, however, these translators may want to consider that the Bible was originally written in Hebrew and then later translated into Greek.
The Plight of Translators & Interpretors
Translators must be able to understand various elements of their own language, the language they're translating from, and the document they're translating. A translator isn't someone who just looks up a word in a dictionary, translating a document word for word. In fact, translation is a moving and growing field!
The very definition of what a translator does also serves to describe the difficult and tedium involved in such work, “systematic study of the theory, the description and the application of translation,"1 A translator has to take a number of things into consideration including:
The language from which the text is being translated
The language to which the text is being translated
Culture (either in terms of the cultural differences between speakers of the source language and speakers of the target language or in terms of “the culture of the day.” The Bible is a prime example of the latter.)
The personality of the writer (this includes any biases he or she may bring to the table.)
While taking the above into consideration, a translator will likely hit a few snares. For example, in the translation of the Bible, translators have met phrases that could mean one thing or another. A famous example of this is “The Song of Solomon” where the writer is describing a relationship with a woman using terms of kinship, namely'sister', to describe closeness with an individual. The text attempts to convey a close bond and a level of equality with a woman, not an incestuous relationship with a sister.2
Problems with Google Translate & Other Web Translators
As a more colorful example of meaning getting lost in translation, take a look at the following phrase: “A computer translator will take everything literally."
I translated this phrase into Bengali using Google translate “একটি কম্পিউটার অনুবাদক সবকিছু আক্ষরিক অর্থ গ্রহণ করা হবে,” and then took the Bengali and translated it into Greek, “Τα πάντα πρέπει να ληφθεί κυριολεκτικά μεταφράζεται από έναν υπολογιστή.” Finally, I took the Greek version and translated it back into English, “Everything must be taken literally translates from one computer.”
What does “Everything must be taken literally translates from one computer,” mean? Of course, given that I know the original English meaning, I felt my thoughts would be either be biased toward the original English version (since I created the example) or toward something wildly different (since I'm trying to make a point,) so I asked a few unsuspecting friends to take the sentence, “Everything must be taken literally translates from one computer,” throw out what didn't make sense, and turn it into a complete thought.
Out of five friends, two responded with, “I don't understand the sentence” and three were able to make their own sentences:
“Everything must be literally translated from the brain as if it acts as our computer.”
“Everything from the main computer should be taken literally.”
“Literally everything from the one computer must be translated.”
This example serves to illustrate three things:
When translating something literally, as Google Translate often does, the meaning can be skewed.
How human translators are forced to fill in the gaps using what information they have. In the above case, the translators (my friends), had no context to go by other than keywords in the phrase and the fact that I was picking their brains for a linguistics project.
Why a translator should consider the influences of their own environment when translating. The respondents who were able to create sentences, (in the order of the responses) are a polysomnographer who studies the sleeping brain using a computer (it was the tie between this response and this person's employment that I found particularly notewo