Translation & Interpreting

It's been awhile since I posted anything about translation or interpreting, so I thought I'd take a break from the FL issues by stepping out of the classroom and into the often invisible world where people live, breath and work, employing the highest level of language skills possible to the human mind: in translation and interpreting.

If you think it's an exageration to say that translation and interpreting are the highest levels of language skills possible to the human mind, consider what Martin Heidegger had to say just about language: "Language is the highest and everywhere the foremost of thse assents which we human beings can never articulate solely out of our own means" (quoted in Steiner, G. After Babel, 3rd ed.: Oxford U. Press, 1998, just before chapter one). And Heidegger's statement doesn't even begin to deal with the doubling of the mystery of language by introducing a second language, or a third, or a fourth...

So, first of all, for my general readers, there is a difference between translation and interpreting. I am (almost never) an interpreter. I am (almost always) a translator. As the link above explains, translators and interpreters are very different types of people. From my perspective, being a simultaneous interpreter is like being a blind tightrope walker who has to run, juggling dishes, without a net. To continue with another analogy, being a translator is like being a hiker -- sometimes the road is steep, sometimes you have to jog or even run a bit, but you have the advantage of being able to assess and if need be, reassess your surroundings. You can backtrack if you need to.

The process of translation is both artful and technical. Interestingly, our word for "technical" comes from Greek, tekne, which encompassed both notions. So, translation can be said to be an exacting art or a creative science. One warning: Translation and interpreting are not careers people can suddenly decide to do after high school -- unless they are already exceedingly skilled in two languages. You'll notice I didn't say "bilingual," because there is too much confusion about what that means.

Finally, I leave you with two articles. One deals with some of the problems of one of the two main branches of translation work: Literary translation. The other is about the alchemical experience of translation -- what translators experience as they work, whether they work in the other main branch -- technical -- or literary.