Re: [TIED] O tempora, o translatores!

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

From: Dennis Poulter

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 4:11 PM

Subject: [TIED] In Defensione Translatorum

 

Dear Dennis,

 

I've done some translation for a publishing house specialising in popular-science books, so I know what you mean, and I fully sympathise with what you say in defence of the profession. The hardest part of the job I did was having to repair the damage done by poor proofreading and typesetting in the original -- e.g. innumerable misquoted forms and distorted transcriptions presented as samples of exotic (or even not-so-exotic) languages in a linguistic atlas of the world (a nice book, by the way, but another victim of low production costs and murderous deadlines). I did it -- though it wasn't really my responsibility and the need to do some extra research kept slowing down my work -- because I realised the publishers had no linguistic expert to go through that exotic stuff again; and as my name was on the title page, I didn't wish to be associated with someone else's botched job. Yes, the blame must be justly distributed. Where are those ruthless editors of yore?

 

Piotr

 

Dennis wrote:

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