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Off topic: Interesting article in the issue of ATA CHRONICLE
Thread poster: Javier Wasserzug
Javier Wasserzug
Javier Wasserzug  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 08:20
English to Spanish
+ ...
May 2, 2013

How Mature Are We, Really, When It Comes to Language?

Even though translators and interpreters are language professionals, we often become irate when we hear people use a word in a way that we believe is incorrect

http://www.smartling.com/static/pdf/how-mature-are-we-really-when-it-comes-to-language.pdf
 
Phil Hand
Phil Hand  Identity Verified
China
Local time: 23:20
Chinese to English
Translation is inherently conservative? May 2, 2013

Very interesting, thank you, Javier and Nataly.

I was thinking about something related to this a while ago, and it struck me that in some ways, much translation is inherently conservative. We try to reproduce the message of one text in another idiom that is not our own. I learn how to write like a British engineer for an afternoon, and carefully reproduce all the features of engineers' language that I can as I explain this Chinese building project. It's creative in that I make somet... See more
Very interesting, thank you, Javier and Nataly.

I was thinking about something related to this a while ago, and it struck me that in some ways, much translation is inherently conservative. We try to reproduce the message of one text in another idiom that is not our own. I learn how to write like a British engineer for an afternoon, and carefully reproduce all the features of engineers' language that I can as I explain this Chinese building project. It's creative in that I make something new, a new combination of meaning and language; but it's conservative in that my highest ambition is to write something to which a real engineer will react by thinking, "I might have written that."

It's built into the way I work, too. If I'm writing a phrase that seems innovative, I Google what I've written, to see if anyone else has phrased this idea in exactly this way before. If someone in my target genre has used that exact phrase before, it's a win! I'm writing the right way.

Of course, knowing a language means knowing how to innovate in that language. But that part can be easy to forget when I spend so much of my time actively trying to avoid innovating! So I think there is a curious tension between the creativity that we have to have, and the conservative approach to language that often characterises our work.

But we should guard against language prescriptivism. I think Nataly captures it well in this quote from the article:
It is one thing to identify attributes of a word in a detached and neutral way so that we can select the perfect option. It is quite another to react negatively to a newly created term, a nonstandard pronunciation, or a creative use of grammar.
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Interesting article in the issue of ATA CHRONICLE






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