Something Different: Translation

Thought I'd change the subject a bit and share this with you - an article I wrote to introduce translation. The examples are from Russian, but the principles will hold good no matter what language you're working in.

How to translate

First, read the article all the way through once. Don't worry about the words you don't know, keep on reading.

When you get to the end of the article, summarize it. In your head or - better - on a piece of paper. What is the article about - not just the facts, but the purpose? Every article - every piece of communication - is an attempt to convey an idea from one person to another(s). Is the article a summary of events? A plain news story? Or is it an analysis of them? Is the author pro or con? If con, is he merely attacking, or does he have countersuggestions? If pro, is he merely praising, or is he trying to convert the naysayers? Is he plain-speaking, sarcastic, lofty, casual, formal, passionate, detached, or angry? Why did he write the article at all? Knowing that will help you translate it.

The next thing to do is - if you have time, which, granted, you may not - go onto the Internet and plug a few key words or concepts into Google. Find yourself a few articles that will explain the background for you. It's much easier to translate an analysis of a political speech if you know what the speech actually said, and the political circumstances in which is was made - and who made it. A speech by Putin is rather different than one by Zhirninovsky, or Bush or Schroeder for that matter. An argument over the future of Chechnya is easier to understand (and thus translate) if you know what's been going on there for the past decade - or even century. You don't have to make yourself an expert, but you need some grounding.

And that, parenthetically, is why you need to read widely in not only Russian, but English. It's hard to be able to deal with level 3 texts (opinion and suasion, with hefty helpings of shared cultural assumptions) in Russian if you don't read them in English, and the more reading you do, the more you'll understand not only the facts of a situation, but the rhetorical devices and styles used by writers in all languages.

Once you have a fairly good handle on the topic, go back to your article. (Another reason to read often: you can have a good handle on things even when you don't have time for special research.) Read through it again, this time underlining or otherwise marking the words you don't know. Once you've gone through the whole article, you can start looking up words.

Be careful to make sure you get the right meanings. Note the verb with its arguments - the case of its object or the prepositions it takes. Vyvedit' iz is different from vyvedit' v; ozhidat' with genitive is different than with accusative; s with genitive very different than with instrumental. Make note of the -sya ending turning transitives to intransitives: did the vandals show no interest in anything, or did they present no interest at all - that is, were they bored, or boring? Even more important, make sure you are in the right subject area: if you're dealing with the power failure of 2005, magistral probably means main power line instead of highway, for instance, and razryad isn't a category or rank but spark discharge.

Now you can begin translating. Keeping in mind the purpose and the tone of the article, keep the English as close to that as you can. If the original was light and breezy, stay away from pomposity or overly formal phrasing; conversely, if the original was careful and deliberate, stay away from slang and casual terms. Watch for words in quotes: Russian authors tend to use them to mark slang, or figurative usages, as well as actual quotations. This can be helpful: S 1991 gosudarstvo nauchilos' "kidat'" svoikh grazhdan, for instance, translates to "Since 1991, the government has learned to "throw" its citizens". This makes no sense and should not be left like that. The quotes point you (or should point you) to a dictionary of slang, where you will learn that kidat' means "to cheat".

Style is important. Try to reproduce the author's, whether formal or casual. It's part of the message. Be formal, be wordy, be casual, be elegant - whichever the author was. It's very important to remain transparent - don't impose your own feelings on the author: if he calls them "freedom fighters" don't you call them "terrorists", for instance. Tell your readers what he's trying to tell them.

When you come to a difficult spot, take the sentence apart clause by clause. Match the verbs with their arguments - subject and complements - in each clause, and then link the clauses together. Complementizers subordinate entire clauses to other clauses - relatives and other embedded clauses play roles within the sentence. "Due to, because of, after, before" - all of these will show you how the compound sentence is joined. The complex sentence will often have prepositions followed by to, chto, whose function is to make the clause introduced by chto, chtoby, kak into the object of the preposition, in the case of the to. Do togo, kak oni priekhali is simply "after they arrived" - since oni priekahli can't be put into genitive. Also watch for words in one case intruding into a string of words in another: these are often modifiers than will have to be moved in English: the prepared by the fatfaced scumbag Zhdanov decree" has an instrumental 'intrusion' that must be repositioned, yielding "the decree, prepared by the fat faced scumbag Zhdanov".

Account for particles. Are they emphasizing? Creating a tense (uzhe and eshche are often making English perfects (have arrived, had gone), for instance)? Whatever they're doing, you can't leave them out; they're there for a purpose. Reflect that. And make sure you keep them in the right place, too: "Even John can pass this course" is a very different thing than "John can pass even this course". The same with adverbs; as neither they nor particles show any grammatical agreement, they must modify what they're next to, unlike other words which can be separated from the rest of their phrase as their grammatical endings point the linkages. Use those endings; they're your best friends.

This works on the larger scales, as well. Bear in mind that no one writes in individual sentences, meant to stand alone. All sentences in a coherent text are linked to each other, sometimes just by virtue of following each other but more often by conjunctions and complementizers that overtly join them. Look for things such as "then, later, because, moreover, on the other hand, thus, but, as well as": these will give you the article's flow.

Once you have finished your first draft, go over it again, rewording it so that it's English in its structure. Make sure all heavy modifiers, especially fronted participial phrases, are moved to follow their nouns, for instance. Be careful that instrumental predicates have not become subjects – is it "MTS subscribers have become victims" or “victims have become MTS subscribers”?

Once you've done that, there's a step you should take if you have the time: put the translation aside for at least an hour, a day if possible. If you don't have that much time, at least take a few minutes. Then read it again, as if you'd never read the original. Does it make sense? Does it cohere, argue a point, and hang together? Is it stylistically unified?

If you can answer ‘yes’ to these questions you can be confident you’ve done a good job.