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Translation is the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language (the "source text") and the production, in another language, of an equivalent text (the "target text," or "translation") that communicates the same message.

Translation must take into account a number of constraints, including context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, their idioms and the like.

Traditionally translation has been a human activity, though attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural-language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer-assisted translation).

Perhaps the most common misconception about translation is that there exists a simple "word-for-word" relation between any two languages, and that translation is therefore a straightforward and mechanical process. On the contrary, historical differences between languages often dictate differences of expression.

Source and target texts may differ substantially in length.

Translation is fraught with uncertainties as well as the potential for inadvertent "spilling over" of idioms and usages from one language into the other, producing linguistic hybrids, for example, "Franglais" (French-English), "Spanglish" (Spanish-English), "Poglish" (Polish-English) and "Portunhol" (Portuguese-Spanish).

The term

Etymologically, "translation" is a "carrying across" or "bringing across." The Latin "translatio" derives from the perfect passive participle, "translatus," of "transferre" ("to transfer" — from "trans," "across" + "ferre," "to carry" or "to bring"). The modern Romance, Germanic and Slavic European languages have generally formed their own equivalent terms for this concept after the Latin model — after "transferre" or after the kindred "traducere" ("to bring across" or "to lead across").

Additionally, the Greek term for "translation," "metaphrasis" ("a speaking across"), has supplied English with "metaphrase" — a "literal translation," or "word-for-word" translation — as contrasted with "paraphrase" ("a saying in other words," from the Greek "paraphrasis").

Misconceptions

Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if it were an exact science — as if consistent one-to-one correlations existed between words and phrases in different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically-reproducible, much as in cryptography. Such novices may assume that all that is needed to translate a text is to "encode" and "decode" between languages, using a translation dictionary as the "codebook."

On the contrary, such a fixed relationship would only exist, were a new language synthesized and at the same time synchronized with a pre-existing language in such a way that each word would forever carry exactly the same scope and shades of meaning, with careful attention given to the preservation of etymological roots and lexical "ecological niches," assuming that these were known with certainty.

If the new language were subsequently to take on a life apart from such cryptographic use, each word would spontaneously begin to assume new shades of meaning and cast off previous associations, thereby vitiating any such artificial synchronization. Henceforth translation would require the disciplines described in this article.

There has been debate as to whether translation is an art or a craft. Literary translators, such as Gregory Rabassa in If This Be Treason, argue that translation is an art, though one that is teachable. Other translators, mostly those who work on technical, business or legal documents, regard their métier as a craft — one that can not only be taught, but that is subject to linguistic analysis and that benefits from academic study.

Whether translation is an art or craft may depend on the nature of the text being translated. A relatively simple document, e.g. a product brochure, may sometimes be translated quickly, using techniques familiar to advanced language-students. By contrast, a newspaper editorial, a political speech, or a book on almost any subject will ordinarily require not only the craft of good language skills and research technique, but a substantial knowledge of the pertinent subject matter, a cultural sensitivity, and a mastery of the art of good writing.

Translation has, indeed, served as a writing school for many recognized writers. And translators, including the early modern European translators of the Bible, helped shape the very languages they translated into. Along with ideas, they imported into their languages, calques of grammatical structures and of vocabulary from the source languages.

Interpreting

Interpreting, or "interpretation," is the intellectual activity that consists of facilitating oral or sign language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or among three or more speakers who are not speaking, or signing, the same language.

The words "interpreting" and "interpretation" both can be used to refer to this activity; the word "interpreting" is commonly used in the profession and in the translation-studies field in avoiding the other meanings of the word "interpretation."

Fidelity vs. transparency

Fidelity (otherwise "faithfulness") and transparency are two often-competing qualities that have been regarded for millenia as ideals for translation, particularly literary translation. A critic of the 17th-century French translator Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt coined the phrase, "les belles infidèles," to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.

Fidelity is the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, and without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning.

Transparency is the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions.

A translation meeting the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation meeting the second criterion — an "idiomatic translation." The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth.

The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation would appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong," and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine-translation systems, often results in patent nonsense with only a humorous value (see "round-trip translation").

Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously strive to produce a literal translation. Literary translators and translators of religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source. In order to do this, they deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Likewise, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language in order to provide "local color" in the translation.

The concepts of fidelity and transparency are viewed differently in some recent translation theories. In some quarters, the idea is gaining momentum that acceptable translations can be as creative and original as their source texts.

In recent decades, the most prominent advocates of non-transparent translation modes have included the French translation scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations (L'épreuve de l'étranger, 1984), and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones (see, for example, his "Call to Action" in The Translator's Invisibility, 1994).

Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts of German Romanticism, the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of "foreignization" being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward ," i.e., transparency, and those that move the "reader toward ," i.e., an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter approach. His preference was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote German literature.

For the most part, the concepts of "fidelity" and "transparency" remain strong in Western traditions.

• Factual contribution > Final cause (Aristole): Due to legal litigation rulings, risk & quality standards, like ISO/IEC Guide 73 and EN-15038:2006, now specify the implementation of "Purpose and Use of the Translation (Final Cause)" among all roles of a translation project (translator, reviewer, revisor, proofreader) in order to align role attention to the Final Cause for quality improvement, and now legally overrule the weight of this topic making it a liability risk for translators. Jody Byrne, "Caveat Translator: Understanding the Legal Consequences of Errors in Professional Translation," JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation., Issue 07 - January 2007. "Translators can be found liable under both contract law and under tort law.".

They are, however, not as prevalent in some non-Western ones. Thus the Indian epic, the Ramayana, has numerous versions in the many Indian languages, and the stories are different in each. If one considers the words used for translating into the Indian languages, whether those be Aryan or Dravidian languages, he is struck by the freedom that is granted to the translators. This may relate to a devotion to prophetic passages that strike a deep religious chord, or to a vocation to instruct unbelievers. Similar examples are to be found in medieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to the customs and values of the audience.

Equivalence

The question of fidelity vs. transparency has also been formulated in terms of, respectively, "formal equivalence" and "dynamic equivalence."

"Dynamic equivalence" (or "functional equivalence") conveys the essential thought expressed in a source text — if necessary, at the expense of literality, original sememe and word order, the source text's active vs. passive voice, etc.

By contrast, "formal equivalence" (sought via "literal" translation) attempts to render the text "literally," or "word for word" (the latter expression being itself a word-for-word rendering of the classical Latin "verbum pro verbo") — if necessary, at the expense of features natural to the target language.

There is, however, no sharp boundary between dynamic and formal equivalence. On the contrary, they represent a spectrum of translation approaches. Each is used at various times and in various contexts by the same translator, and at various points within the same text — sometimes simultaneously. Competent translation, indeed, entails the judicious blending of dynamic and formal equivalents. And, in some cases, a translation may be both dynamically and formally equivalent to the original text.

• Factual contribution > Liabilities: Jody Byrne "At the very heart of translation studies is the issue of translation quality. Yet, while there are numerous methods for assessing the quality of translations, little is known about what happens when a translator produces a bad translation. Translation error, as a whole, can have significant consequences for both translator and client."

Literary translation

If the translation of non-literary works is regarded as a skill, the translation of literary works (novels, short stories, plays, poems, etc.) is much more of an art. In multilingual countries such as Canada, translation is often considered a literary pursuit in its own right. Figures such as Sheila Fischman, Robert Dickson and Linda Gaboriau are notable in Canadian literature specifically as translators, and the Governor General's Awards present prizes for the year's best English-to-French and French-to-English literary translations.

Writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Vasily Zhukovsky have also made a name for themselves as literary translators.

Poetry is considered by many the most difficult genre to translate, given the difficulty in rendering both the form and the content in the target language. In his influential 1959 paper "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," the Russian-born linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson went so far as to declare that "poetry by definition untranslatable." In 1974 the American poet James Merrill wrote a poem, "Lost in Translation," which in part explores this. The question was also considered in Douglas Hofstadter's 1997 book, Le Ton beau de Marot.

Translation of sung texts — sometimes called "singing translation" — is closely linked to translation of poetry because most vocal music, at least in the Western tradition, is set to verse, especially verse in regular patterns with rhyme. (Since the late 19th century, musical setting of prose and free verse has also been practiced in some art music, though popular music tends to remain conservative in its retention of stanzaic forms with or without refrains.) A rudimentary example of translating poetry for singing is church hymns, such as the German chorales translated into English by Catherine Winkworth.

Translation of sung texts is generally much more restrictive than translation of poetry, because in the former there is little or no freedom to choose between a versified translation and a translation that dispenses with verse structure. One might modify or omit rhyme in a singing translation, but the assignment of syllables to specific notes in the original musical setting places great challenges on the translator. There is the option in prose, less so in verse, of adding or deleting a syllable here and there by subdividing or combining notes, respectively, but even with prose the process is nevertheless almost like strict verse translation because of the need to stick as closely as possible to the original prosody.

Other considerations in writing a singing translation include repetition of words and phrases, the placement of rests and/or punctuation, the quality of vowels sung on high notes, and rhythmic features of the vocal line that may be more natural to the original language than to the target language.

Whereas the singing of translated texts has been common for centuries, it is less necessary when a written translation is provided in some form to the listener, for instance, as an insert in a concert program or as projected titles in a performance hall or visual medium.

• Factual contribution > Liabilities: Jody Byrne "Even literal translation, which is considerably more sophisticated than word for word translation, cannot satisfactorily cope with every translation eventuality. So by accepting that translation involves some form of intellectual addition to or processing of the information in the source text, whether by adding, removing, clarifying, interpreting, rephrasing, recontextualising or recasting information for the target audience, we are in effect accepting a role for translators which is subject to a greater degree of liability than a mere conduit of information."

General history

Discussions — in modern times, copious — of the theory and practice of translation reach back into antiquity and show remarkable continuities. The distinction that had been drawn by the ancient Greeks between "metaphrase" ("literal" translation) and "paraphrase" would be adopted by the English poet and translator John Dryden (1631-1700), who represented translation as the judicious blending of these two modes of phrasing when selecting, in the target language, "counterparts," or equivalents, for the expressions used in the source language:

"When appear... literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since... what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words: 'tis enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense."

Dryden cautioned, however, against the license of "imitation," i.e. of adapted translation: "When a painter copies from the life... he has no privilege to alter features and lineaments..."

This general formulation of the central concept of translation — equivalence — is probably as adequate as any that has been proposed ever since Cicero and Horace, in first-century-BCE Rome, famously and literally cautioned against translating "word for word" ("verbum pro verbo").

Despite occasional theoretical diversities, the actual practice of translators has hardly changed since antiquity. Except for some extreme metaphrasers in the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, and adapters in various periods (especially pre-Classical Rome, and the 18th century), translators have generally shown prudent flexibility in seeking equivalents — "literal" where possible, paraphrastic where necessary — for the original meaning and other crucial "values" (e.g., style, verse form, concordance with musical accompaniment or, in films, with speech articulatory movements) as determined from context.

In general, translators have sought, where possible, maximally to preserve the context itself by reproducing the original order of sememes, and hence word order — when necessary, reinterpreting the actual grammatical structure. The grammatical differences between fixed-word-order languages (e.g., English, French, German) and free-word-order languages (e.g., Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian) have been no impediment in this regard.

When a target language has lacked terms that are found in a source language, translators have borrowed them, thereby enriching the target language. Thanks in great measure to the exchange of "calques" (French for "tracings") between languages, and to their importation from Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages, there are few concepts that are "untranslatable" among the modern European languages.

In general, the greater the contact and exchange that has existed between two languages, or between both and a third one, the greater is the ratio of metaphrase to paraphrase that may be used in translating between them. However, due to shifts in "ecological niches" of words, a common etymology is sometimes misleading as a guide to current meaning in one or the other language. The English "actual," for example, should not be confused with the cognate French "actuel" (meaning "present," "current") or the Polish "aktualny" ("present," "current").

The translator's role as a bridge for "carrying across" values between cultures has been discussed at least since Terence, Roman adapter of Greek comedies, in the second century BCE. The translator's role is, however, by no means a passive and mechanical one, and so has also been compared to that of an artist. The main ground seems to be the concept of parallel creation found in critics as early as Cicero. Dryden observed that "Translation is a type of drawing after life..." Comparison of the translator with a musician or actor goes back at least to Samuel Johnson's remark about Alexander Pope playing Homer on a flageolet, while Homer himself used a bassoon.

If translation be an art, it is no easy one. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon wrote that if a translation is to be true, the translator must know both languages, as well as the science that he is to translate; and finding that few translators did, he wanted to do away with translation and translators altogether.

The first European to assume that one translates satisfactorily only toward his own language may have been Martin Luther, translator of the Bible into German. Certainly since Johann Gottfried Herder, in the 18th century, it has been axiomatic that one works only toward his own language.

Further compounding all these demands upon the translator is the fact that not even the most complete dictionary or thesaurus can ever be a fully adequate guide in translation. Alexander Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation (1790), emphasized that assiduous reading is a more comprehensive guide to a language than are dictionaries. The same point, but also including listening to the spoken language, had earlier been made in 1783 by Onufry Andrzej Kopczyński, member of Poland's Society for Elementary Books, who was called "the last Latin poet."

The special role of the translator in society was well described in an essay, published posthumously in 1803, by Ignacy Krasicki — Poland's La Fontaine, Primate of Poland, poet, encyclopedist, author of the first Polish novel, and translator from French and Greek:

"ranslation... is in fact an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labor and portion of common minds; should be by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works, and hold higher than their own glory the service that they render to their country."

Religious texts

Translation of religious works has played an important role in history. Buddhist monks who translated the Indian sutras into Chinese often skewed their translations to better reflect China's very different culture, emphasizing notions such as filial piety.

A famous mistranslation of the Bible is the rendering of the Hebrew word "keren," which has several meanings, as "horn" in a context where it actually means "beam of light." As a result, artists have for centuries depicted Moses the Lawgiver with horns growing out of his forehead. An example is Michelangelo's famous sculpture. Christian anti-Semites used such depictions to spread hatred of the Jews, claiming that they were devils with horns.

One of the first recorded instances of translation in the West was the rendering of the Old Testament into Greek in the third century B.C.E. The resulting translation is known as the Septuagint, a name that alludes to the "seventy" translators (seventy-two in some versions) who were commissioned to translate the Bible on the island of Paphos. Each translator worked in solitary confinement in a separate cell, and legend has it that all seventy versions were identical. The Septuagint became the source text for later translations into many languages, including Latin, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian.

Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translation, is still considered one of the greatest translators in history for rendering the Bible into Latin. The Roman Catholic Church used his translation (known as the Vulgate) for centuries, but even this translation at first stirred much controversy.

The period preceding and contemporary with the Protestant Reformation saw the translation of the Bible into local European languages, a development that greatly affected Christianity's split into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, due to disparities between Catholic and Protestant versions of crucial words and passages.

Martin Luther's Bible in German, Jakub Wujek's in Polish, and the King James Bible in English had lasting effects on the religions, cultures and languages of those countries.

Machine translation

Machine translation (MT) is a procedure whereby, in principle, a computer program, once activated, analyses a source text and produces a target text, without further human intervention.

In reality, however, machine translation typically does involve human intervention, in the form of pre-editing and post-editing. An exception to that rule might be, e.g., the translation of technical specifications (strings of technical terms and adjectives), using a dictionary-based machine-translation system.

To date, machine translation — a major goal of natural-language processing — has met with limited success.

Machine translation has been brought to a large public by tools available on the Internet, such as AltaVista's Babel Fish, and by low-cost programs such as Babylon, and freeware such as Lingoes and StarDict. These tools produce a "gisting translation" — a rough translation that "gives the gist" of the source text.

With proper terminology work, with preparation of the source text for machine translation (pre-editing), and with re-working of the machine translation by a professional human translator (post-editing), commercial machine-translation tools can produce useful results, especially if the machine translation system is integrated with a translation memory or globalization management system.

In regard to texts (e.g., weather reports) with limited ranges of vocabulary and simple sentence structure, machine translation can deliver results that do not require much human intervention to be useful. Also, the use of a controlled language, combined with a machine-translation tool, will typically generate largely comprehensible translations, as demonstrated at Uwe Muegge's website.

Engineer and futurist Raymond Kurzweil has predicted that, by 2012, machine translation will be powerful enough to dominate the field of translation. Likewise, in 2004, MIT's Technology Review listed universal translation and interpretation as likely to become available "within a decade." Such claims have, however, been made since the first serious forays into machine translation, in the 1950s.

Relying on machine translation exclusively ignores the fact that communication in human language is context-embedded and that it takes a person to comprehend the context of the original text with a reasonable degree of probability. It is certainly true that even purely human-generated translations are prone to error. Therefore, to ensure that a machine-generated translation will be useful to a human being and that publishable-quality translation is achieved, such translations must be reviewed and edited by a human.

Uwe Muegge, however, has asserted that in certain applications, e.g. product descriptions written in a controlled language, a dictionary-based machine translation system has been demonstrated in a production environment to produce perfect translation results that do not require any human intervention.

Computer assist

Computer-assisted translation (CAT), also called computer-aided translation, is a form of translation wherein a human translator creates a target text with the assistance of a computer program. In computer-assisted translation, the machine supports a human translator.

Computer-assisted translation can include standard dictionary and grammar software. The term, however, normally refers to a range of specialized programs available to the translator, including translation-memory, terminology-management, concordance, and alignment programs.

Cultural translation

This is a new area of interest in the field of translation studies. Cultural translation is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture. The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analyzing the nature of transformation in cultures. For example, ethnography is considered a translated narrative of an abstract living culture.

Translators' liabilities & obligations

(in building process - to remain untouched)

Introduction

• Jody Byrne, "Caveat Translator: Understanding the Legal Consequences of Errors in Professional Translation," JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation., Issue 07 - January 2007:
  • "At the very heart of translation studies is the issue of translation quality. Yet, while there are numerous methods for assessing the quality of translations, little is known about what happens when a translator produces a bad translation.
    • This paper will show that translation error, as a whole, can have significant consequences for both translator and client and by examining a number of case studies gathered from official reports and communications, court records, newspaper articles and books it will illustrate the diversity of situations which can arise as a result of translation errors.
    • The paper will then examine the issues of liability and negligence to illustrate the legal means by which translators can be held accountable for the quality of their work. By understanding how liability for faulty translations arises, it will be possible to see the implications of laws and directives governing technical translations which are subsequently examined.
    • This paper examines specific legal requirements relating to technical translation and discusses the consequences of translation errors using specific case studies relating to technical translation."
  • "Even literal translation, which is considerably more sophisticated than word for word translation, cannot satisfactorily cope with every translation eventuality. So by accepting that translation involves some form of intellectual addition to or processing of the information in the source text, whether by adding, removing, clarifying, interpreting, rephrasing, recontextualising or recasting information for the target audience, we are in effect accepting a role for translators which is subject to a greater degree of liability than a mere conduit of information."
• Elisabeth Keller-Stoltenhoff, Werkvertrag vs Dienstvertrag (Teil 1-3) Up-to-date German source. Part 3 with information on the question about liability impacts due to breach of contract (job order contract, Werkvertrag) is to be published in September 2007.

Steaming translation risk management issues emerge that put the traditional structure of topics in a new light. Discussion about the matter is needed, not vandalism and tort, nor the three wise monkeys. Compliance to the 5 Wiki pillar principles is of lack.

Risk Findings

"The general examples and case studies presented illustrate the range of problems errors can cause and they show that the issue of faulty translations is not something which exists solely within academic discussions of translation and translation quality assurance. Instead, translation error, like translation, is a real-world phenomenon which has real-world implications for everyone who comes into contact with translations. It is clear from the case studies presented that the consequences of translation error are very real and that they are something we should be genuinely concerned about. The examples of errors in technical translations serve to reinforce the gravity of this issue and show that translation errors can have disastrous and potentially fatal consequences.

While translators have a clear duty of care to their clients and they must elicit from clients what purpose translations are intended to serve, realistically speaking, translators cannot extract information from clients when the clients themselves do not have the answers. While standards such as DIN 2345 "Translation Contracts" represent an attempt to improve the translation process and to ensure that both translator and client are aware of their responsibilities, the onus still rests with the translator to produce translations which comply with standard procedures to the best of their ability.

Translators can protect themselves to a certain extent and limit their liability in the event of defective translations by not overstating their abilities or making unrealistic promises as to the quality of the translations and by keeping clear records of how they deal with problematic parts of a text (Ansaldi 1999:14). They nevertheless can be found liable under both contract law and under tort law and it behoves them to ensure that they make all reasonable efforts to familiarise themselves with the subject material, source and target conventions and the relevant legislation and requirements governing the texts being translated. Even where translators are not or cannot be held liable for translation errors, there are surely ethical issues involved and the translator has a certain moral responsibility to the injured party. The translation community itself is entitled to expect that its members do not tarnish its image or prejudice its reputation as a result of careless, negligent work.

Despite the apparent lack of cases where translators are held to account for the quality of their work, the potential for litigation is never far away and as technical translators we should always be aware of this and strive to minimise the risk to which we expose ourselves."

In the light of this significant knowledge, facts, and ramifications emerging, the way previous topics were covered thus demands new restructuring. Previous basic assumptions, attitudes, behaviors, structures, and processes are obsolete in this light.

Risk Identification

I. What liability risks are we even talking about? (non-exhaustive list)

Translation is inherently a difficult activity. Translators also face additional well-known problems, which makes the process even more difficult, thus more risky from a liability view:

Source text risks

• Changes made to the text during the translation process
• Illegible or difficult-to-read text
• Inconsistent use of terminology
• Misspelled or misprinted text
• Incomplete text
• Poorly written text (ambiguity or incomprehensibility)
• Missing references in the text (for example the translator is to translate captions to missing photos)
• The source text contains a translation of a quotation that was originally made in the target language, and the original text is unavailable, making word-for-word quoting nearly impossible
• Obvious inaccuracies in the source text (for example "prehistoric Buddhist ruins", when Buddhism was not founded during prehistoric time

Language risks

• Dialect terms and neologisms
• Unexplained acronyms and abbreviations
• Proper names of people, organizations, places, and the like (often there are already official target-language translations, but if they are not supplied with the source text they can be difficult to find)
• Obscure jargon
• Obscure idioms
• Slang
• Stylistic differences, such as redundant phrases in a source language, when redundancy is frowned upon in the target language
• Differences between languages with respect to punctuation conventions

Non-categorized risks

• Rhymes, puns and poetic meters
• Subtle but important properties of language such as euphony or dissonance
• Highly specific cultural references
• Humor
• Words that are commonly known in one culture but generally unknown by the layperson in another culture, such as Chinese 芬多精 (fen1 duo1 jing1) meaning phytoncide: these generally require the addition of an explanation

"Untranslatability" risks

   Main article: Untranslatability risks

The question of whether particular words are untranslatable is often debated, with lists of "untranslatable" words being produced from time to time. These lists often include words such as saudade, a Portuguese word as an example of an "untranslatable". It translates quite neatly however as "sorrowful longing", but does have some nuances that are hard to include in a translation; for instance, it is a positive-valued concept, a subtlety which is not clear in this basic translation.

Some words are hard to translate only if one wishes to remain in the same grammatical category. For example, it is hard to find a noun corresponding to the Russian почемучка (pochemuchka) or the Yiddish שלימזל (shlimazl), but the English adjectives "inquisitive" and "jinxed" correspond just fine.

Journalists are naturally enthusiastic when linguists document obscure words with local flavor, and are wont to declare them "untranslatable", but in reality these incredibly culture-laden terms are the easiest of all to translate, even more so than universal concepts such as "mother". This is because it is standard practice to translate these words by the same word in the other language, borrowing it for the first time if necessary. For example, an English version of a menu in a French restaurant would rarely translate pâté de foie gras as "fat liver paste", although this is a good description. Instead, the accepted translation is simply pâté de foie gras, or, at most, foie gras pâté. In some cases, only transcription is required: Japanese 山葵 (わさび) translates into English as wasabi. A short description or parallel with a familiar concept is also often acceptable: わさび may also be translated as "Japanese horseradish" or "Japanese mustard".

The more obscure and specific to a culture the term is, the simpler it is to translate. For example, the name of an insignificant settlement such as Euroa in Australia is automatically just "Euroa" in every language in the world that uses the Roman alphabet, whilst it takes some knowledge to be aware that Saragossa is Zaragoza, Saragosse, etc. or that China is 中国, Cina, Chine, and so forth.

   Further information: Translation procedure risks, to be restructured under Translation quality

Common word risks

The words that are truly difficult to translate are often the small, common words, whose precise meaning depends heavily on context. For example, in all its various uses the verb "to get" covers nearly seven columns of the most recent version of the Robert-Collins French-English dictionary. The same is true for most apparently simple, common words, such as "go" (seven columns), "come" (four and a half columns), and so forth.

Cultural aspects can complicate translation, as people from England, France or China would likely describe or draw "bread", du pain or 面包 (miàn bāo) as their culturally common bread — an idea best expressed by their word for bread, rather than another language's word which comes pre-loaded with its cultural referent.

Differing levels of precision inherent in a language also play a role. For example, if one is discussing a location that is nearer to the listener than the speaker in Spanish, one would say ahí; if it is away from both interlocutors one would say allí; and if there are connotations or directions involved such as "near there", "over yonder" or "on that side", it would be best to say allá. Conversely, in colloquial French, all three of these concepts of different "theres" as well as the concept of "here" will likely be expressed with the word là.

One language may contain expressions which refer to concepts that do not exist in another language. For example, the French "tutoyer" and "vouvoyer" would both translate into English as "to address as 'you'," since the English singular-informal second-person pronoun "thou" is now an archaism and not generally used. Yet such an English translation vitiates the meaning of the French verbs: "vouvoyer" means to address using the plural or formal "vous," whereas "tutoyer" means to use the singular-informal "tu." Indeed, when English used "thou," its use was the English equivalent of the French "tutoyer"; today it is difficult to give a concise English translation that captures the nuances of the French "tu" and "vous."

The problem often lies in failure to distinguish between translation and glossing. Glossing gives a short (usually one-word) equivalent for each term. Translation decodes the meaning and intent at the text level (not the word level or even sentence level) and then re-encodes them in a target language. Words like saudade and שלימזל are hard to "gloss" into a single other word, but given two or more words they can be perfectly adequately "translated". Similarly, depending on the context, the meaning of the French word "tutoyer", or Spanish "tutear", could be translated as "to be on first name terms with". "Bread" has perhaps a better claim to being untranslatable, since even if we resort to saying "French bread", "Chinese bread", "Algerian bread", and the like, we are relying on our audience knowing what these are like.

Case study risks

The above English article also points out to further subsequent risks sourced from case studies.

Official directive risks

The above English article also points out to further subsequent risks sourced from official directives.

Risk impacts & causes

II. What are the impacts of these risks?

The above English article points out to many grave impacts resulting from these risks. Thus, many translation risks are also the source of socalled unquality costs.

The German article lists:

III. What are the causes for these risks?

Contemporary causes for risk problems are:

• Unquality costs and waste due to structural and process problems (resulting from Kaizen analysis, thus inducing Corrective and Preventative Action)
• Lack of holism, over-emphasis of self-purpose (concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts.")
• Lack of managerial and support processes (check Capability Maturity Model)
• Lack of proper project management, risk management, requirements management, and quality management (FMEA, QFD)
• Lack of process management (virtual workflow) The Getting Things Done (GTD) system is a model of personal workflow management for information workers
• Lack of online collaboration (collaboration, Google Docs, ThinkFree)
• Lack of change management (benchmarking)
• Lack of contract management (liability)
• Lack of documentation (a project registration and status template for looking-back at causes, and for the assessment and monitoring of client payment behavior)
• Lack of service management
• Lack of information management
• Lack of human resource management (competency, knowledge, skill, experience, qualification, training)
• Lack of job preparation, as now specified in quality standards (checklist)
• Lack of a style guide for source and target text
• Lack of terminology management
• Lack of a client feedback questionaire (Customer Relationship Management)
• Unqualities during successor tasks and processes, e.g. due to the lack of purpose and use specification (final cause), thus resulting in communication problems among, and with clients, project managers, translators, other collaborators, reviewers, revisors, proofreaders, and final verifiers (EN-15038:2006)

Many risks mentioned are not a law of nature and are changeable. Organizational development OD is a help against psychological resistance, and a support of innovation processes. The objective is to attain a capability maturity level of repeatability and less heroics by employing process improvement.

Risk Assessment

IV. How are these risks to be assessed?

Numerous different risk formulae exist, but perhaps the most widely accepted formula for risk quantification is:

• Rate of occurrence multiplied by the impact of the event equals risk

Research has shown that the financial benefits of risk management are less dependent on the formula used, but are more dependent on the frequency and how risk assessment is performed. Leaning on the causality of Aristotle, there are two conceptions to measure translation success. The first one is legally required, backed by international quality standards, and also supports collaboratively organized organizational structures. The second one was traditionally higher-ranked:

Final cause

Quality standards, like EN-15038:2006, now specify the implementation of "Purpose and Use of the Translation (Final Cause)" among all roles of a translation project (translator, reviewer, revisor, proofreader) in order to align role attention to the Final Cause for quality improvement. This approach also has the advantage of enhancing cooperation, thus impacting the success of larger collaboratively-structured translation tasks (even Mass collaboration).

"Happiness comes from 'fidelity to a worthy purpose' (Helen Keller)"... It is like getting everybody back on track, and outpacing self-purpose with state-of-art online collaboration.

Efficient cause

As the goal of translation is to ensure that the source text and target text communicate the same message, while taking into account the constraints placed on the translator (such as the Aristotle causality principle Final Cause), a successful translation (under the Aristotle causality principle Efficient Cause) can be judged within the scope of the following topics:

• Fidelity vs transparency

• Equivalenz

Both are described further above. Yet, some traditional advocates of these topics continue to downplay the litigation and liability risks incurred, even though a body of case studies exist.

Translation risk treatments

V. How are translators obliged to remedy and prevent these risks in order to comply with liability requirements?

Approaches

• Tolerate (retention)

The article discussion gives a case study insight to recurring and standard resistance and implementation problems due to lack of basic knowledge, such as basic terms, legal requirements, and the history of quality management etc. Adequate change management measures and training must be performed as in all organizational development processes, see benchmarking.

(pending)

• Treat (mitigation)

See Emergency management, Disaster management, Business continuity

(pending)

• Terminate (elimination)

(pending)

Risk management standard (ISO/IEC Guide 73)

See also:

• A Risk Management Standard is available to download for free in fourteen languages. (Published by IRM, AIRMIC and ALARM).
• Risk management in SMEs many tools for free in 4 languages.

Translation services quality standard (EN-15038:2006)

Translation quality standards were developed to give client organizations a yardstick to assess and describe the capability of translation service providers to provide translations on time, within budget, and to acceptable standards. Quality standards are intended to enable an assessment of an organization's maturity for service providance. It is an important tool for outsourcing and exporting translation work. Translation agencies in India, and elsewhere lean on quality standards for enabling them to be able to compete for outsourcing contracts on an even footing. Quality standards provide a good framework for organizational improvement. It allows translation companies to prioritize their process improvement initiatives. Greater quality is achieved by building the capability to assess and reduce unquality costs. This capability maturity is at least to be demonstrated in the case of liability litigation.

See the pdf file for download below.

• Transfer (buying insurance)

Business insurance, Liability insurance, Professional liability insurance

(pending)

See also (general)

• Computer-assisted translation (CAT)
• Cultural identity
• Dubbing
• False friend
• Fan translation
• Fansub
• Globalization management system (GMS)
• Interpreting
• Internationalization
• Legal translation
• List of translators
• Localization
• Machine translation (MT)
• Parallel text (or translation)
• Scanlation
• Subtitling
• Terminology
• Transculturation

See also (theory)

• Susan Bassnett
• Walter Benjamin
• Antoine Berman
• Dynamic and formal equivalence
• Eugene Nida
• Literal translation
• Russian translation
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• Untranslatability
• Walter Benjamin

Notes

1. Average differences in length between English and corresponding other language texts, compiled on Cucumis.org
2. Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 83.
3. This approach was recounted in Lt. Viktor Belenko's 1974 Soviet defection, and his scrawled "English" translation of his desire to deliver the MIG-25. Though he understood that there would be a few limitations in his translation, he confused the authorities because it read more like a threat than an invitation. MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko, 1980 ISBN .
4. Samuel Johnson in his preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755 and Jonathon Green's Chasing the Sun, 1996 ISBN , speak at length of the trials, in-depth and inconclusive investigations, disagreements, and finally the expedient solutions that lexicographers must undertake in the name of practicality.
5. Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 83.
6. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 84.
7. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 84.
8. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 85.
9. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 85.
10. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," pp. 85-86.
11. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 86.
12. Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil," p. 87.
13. Vashee, Kirti (2007). "Statistical machine translation and translation memory: An integration made in heaven!". ClientSide News Magazine. 7 (6): 18–20. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
14. Muegge (2006), "Fully automatic high quality machine translation of restricted text: A case study", in "Translating and the computer 28. Proceedings of the twenty-eighth international conference on translating and the computer, 16-17 November 2006, London", London: Aslib. ISBN .

References

• Balcerzan, Edward, ed., Pisarze polscy o sztuce przekładu, 1440-1974: Antologia (Polish Writers on the Art of Translation, 1440-1974: an Anthology), Poznań, Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1977.
• Berman, Antoine (1984). "L'épreuve de l'étranger". Excerpted in English in: Venuti, Lawrence, editor (2002, 2nd edition 2004). The Translation Studies Reader.
• Darwish, Ali (1999). "Towards a Theory of Constraints in Translation". (@turjuman Online).
• Kasparek, Christopher, "The Translator's Endless Toil," The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, pp. 83-87. Includes a discussion of European-language cognates of the term, "translation."
• Kelly, L.G. (1979). The True Interpreter: a History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West. New York, St. Martin's Press. ISBN.
• Muegge, Uwe (2005). Translation Contract: A Standards-Based Model Solution. AuthorHouse. ISBN.
• Rose, Marilyn Gaddis, guest editor (1980). Translation: agent of communication. (A special issue of Pacific Moana Quarterly, 5:1)
• Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1813). "Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens". Reprinted as "On the Different Methods of Translating" in: Venuti, Lawrence, editor (2002, 2nd edition 2004). The Translation Studies Reader.
• Simms, Norman, editor (1983). Nimrod's Sin: Treason and Translation in a Multilingual World. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Venuti, Lawrence (1994). The Translator's Invisibility. Routledge. ISBN.

External links

Resources

• UNESCO Clearing House for Literary Translation
• Meaning and Music — essay discussing the translation of song lyrics, specifically from English into Spanish. Sample verses from Disney's High School Musical.
• EN-15038:2006 (English) .pdf file, Final draft January 2006
• Early Theories of Translation at Project Gutenberg 1920 text by Flora Ross Amos from the series Columbia University studies in English and comparative literature.

Publications

• Multilingual Computing
• Translation Journal, quarterly edited by Gabe Bokor
• Translation Review, published three times annually by the Center for Translation Studies
• Translation News, news about translations

Associations

• International Association of Conference Translators
• International Federation of Translators
• Localization Industry Standards Association

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