By Johannes Tan
Published in the May 1998 issue of the ATA Chronicle.
Part 1 of this article was published in the April 1997 issue of the ATA Chronicle.
While the source document may contain frustrating amphibologies, annoying circumlocutions, suffocating floccinaucinihiliplifications and outrageous obfuscations; its accurate translation should always be clear, concise, meaningful and easy to understand. |
In-house translators may use indoor facilities, but out-house translators should stay where they belong. |
In a one-page project everybody scrutinizes the punctuation marks; in a 1000-page project, the $ sign. |
To prevent the proliferation of mumbo jumbo and epidemic of pedantry, translators must wash their brain thoroughly after working. |
There are two kinds of translation agencies: Those who keep their own businesses up and running, and those who keep the post office up and running with their endless mailings of database forms to freelance translators. |
All the fun in translation consists of being hopelessly obsessed with what is expressed in the source document and pathologically paranoid with what is implied in the target document. |
The meaning, syntax, structure, tone and register of the source document must conform to those of the translation -- not the other way around. |
Nothing guarantees the arrival of an overdue paycheck more effectively than the arrival of the next job with a yesterday deadline. |
Some newcomers are so polite and humble in entering the translation business, they religiously copy spelling errors and punctuation mistakes scooped from other translators' resumes and homepages. |
Languages of Limited Diffusion -- not ignorance -- are solely responsible for all the Unlimited Confusion they generate. |
Outrageous translation and out-of-context interpretation continuously deliver free in-home amusement for not-very-amused editors. |
A translator's faxed invoice may not be valid, but an incomprehensible message left over a weekend in a translator's voice mail is sacrosanct. |
When you do not have any work, the problem is the mortgage. When you have, it's time. When you have both, it's carpal tunnel syndrome. (With apologies to J.P. Donleavy, author of The Unexpurgated Code). |
If you can speak three languages, you are trilingual. If you can speak two languages, you are bilingual. If you can speak one language, you are an American. (Anon.) |
Since the litmus test for an excellent translation is that the target audience should not realize that it is a translation, the translation budget could be next to nothing. |
The fine print of a "Terms and Conditions" footnote in esoteric legalese and Helvetica Narrow 5 point -- stretched along an 8-inch wide column -- is not meant to be read by the target audience. After all, it is only to be translated. |
Translators can never make up their minds in choosing between two synonyms, let alone determining which subject area to specialize. |
There is nothing wrong with a yesterday deadline. Tomorrow the same project manager already may be calling for another project, from another agency. |
Fifty percent of allotted time for a typical translation process is spent for office politicking and internal bickering on the client's part; 20% for coast-to-coast scrambling to find the cheapest translation cost with the shortest turnaround time; 20% for haggling and negotiations; 5% for getting the source document translatable; and 5% for actually completing the translation itself. |
Since the cerebral localization theory claimed that the language faculty seems to be usually located in the left brain, some language professionals have their brains left behind as soon as a humongous project is on the horizon. |
Translation is the fine art of meeting impossible deadlines to convey incomprehensible documents, containing irrelevant information, written by inadequate copywriters and targeted to indifferent audiences. |