Translators’ confrontations with false ideas about language

By Eugene A. Nida, European Commission Translation Service, Luxembourg

Some of the more aggravating frustrations suffered by translators are the numerous false ideas about language. Too often people assume that if translators only need a good dictionary and a big grammar, they can translate any document into almost any language. Unfortunately most people do not realize that by the time a sizable dictionary is published, it is at least twenty-five years out of date because it takes at least that much time to do the necessary research about language usage. And if such research depends largely on published sources, then these documents are likely to represent even older forms of a language. A fully qualified translator must have in his or her head much more information than any dictionary can ever provide, but it is very subtle data about the way in which different words go together to produce a clear and pleasing text.

Too many publishers imagine that they can farm out translations to a nephew or niece who is studying a foreign language, but the pathetic results of this kind of procedure are all too common. Or a manufacturer may believe that his manual about operating a particular machine is so clear in the original language that almost any translator can produce an adequate translation. And yet advertising and instructional brochures are precisely the kinds of translated documents that often prove both strange and misleading. One set of instructions in English from a European manufacturer about assembling a wood working machine was hopelessly inadequate. I simply could not understand how to proceed, but fortunately the manufacturer had enclosed a copy of the original German text.

Since the capacity to translate or interpret seems to be so natural for any bilingual or multilingual person, most people have a relatively low estimation of the knowledge and skill required to be a fully competent translator. If translating seems to require nothing more than knowing two or more languages, then why should translators be paid more than any bilingual office secretary? Perhaps the fact that publishers are willing to put up with poor and misleading translations is another reason why professional translators have often been regarded as nothing more than frustrated authors. But the density of interlingual communication is changing all of this, and the professional translator or interpreter will inevitably play an increasingly strategic role in a world in which people realize that interlin­gual incompetence is entirely too expensive and dangerous. Wrong translations or interpretations could blow up the world.