In Defensione Translatorum

I agree with what you say about the decline in standards of translation. I used to be a professional translator in the early 70's, and at that time enormous care was taken to ensure not only an accurate translation of the source material, but also a correct rendition in the target language. This entailed working in teams, with native speakers of the languages concerned and wherever possible, experts in the subject matter. This was followed by careful proof reading, and close liaison with the publishers or typesetters.

However, the economic crisis of the late seventies, forced companies to cut back on costs, and translation was one of the first areas to suffer. So whereas once one could make a living working for translation companies, now translators are freelancers, working alone, accepting whatever commissions they can get, no matter what the subject matter, often not translating into their mother tongue, accepting more work than they can comfortably handle in order to make a living, and probably setting themselves impossible deadlines.

The fault also is not all with the translator. Things like incorrect capitalisation is rather a matter for the publisher's or typesetter's proof-readers. Again, economics has forced reductions in this area.

So, I think the problem doesn't lie so much with the translators, who I think usually try to be conscientious in their work, but with the cutting of corners to keep down production costs.

BTW are those hyphens in "everyday-dutch" really there and if so, why?

Also, as an ex-professional translator, I'm not happy with the grammar of "it was intended that this character _is_ preserved...". I would prefer "should be" or "be" .

Cheers

Dennis

----- Original Message -----

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, 14 June, 2000 11:25 PM

Subject: [TIED] De translatoribus

This is what Oswald Szemerényi (a very lucid writer, by the way, and equally at home in Hungarian, German or English) wrote in "Recent Developments in Indo-European Linguistics" (Transactions of the Philological Society 1985. Oxford: Blackwell):

... But this deficiency in linguistic knowledge [resulting from the decline of classical education -- PG] is often combined with a certain lack of care, of conscientiousness. Thus, e.g., German has a verb weiss 'know' and an adjective weiss 'white'. I got a real shock when I first saw in a passage of my Einführung the verb translated into Italian as albo; since then I have found the same mistake in a translation into another Romance language. In both cases I have managed to eliminate the culprit -- not to say criminal -- but both show that the translator -- who nowadays tends to be less and less familiar with the subject matter -- is often unable to understand the text to be translated but he translates regardless, just for the filthy lucre.

... A number or real gems are collected in the latest number of Indogermanische Chronik (IC 30a (1984) no. 118), from which I gratefully cull the following. The IE root *ok- 'consider, think over' is translated in German as überlegen. Unfortunately, the German word can also be an adjective meaning 'superior'. The result is that *ok- taken from a German source now appears as 'lofty'. When the IE root *pezd- ['fart discreetly' -- PG] appears as 'cause a wind to blow softly' one merely shakes one's head at the awkwardness of the expression; but what should one think of the Latin verbal derivative pe:do: appearing with the translation 'foot, furnish with feet', a fruit of ignorance matched by equally phenomenal cheek.