Translation Pains

I finally managed to get my comments on our latest City Plan documents into the city office yesterday, just as the deadline loomed. I spent most of Tuesday evening working on them, and then Edera took over with a first 'cut' at translating them and finally we worked on the translation together yesterday morning.

This process of translating technical documents fascinates me. We don't do as much as we once did, and the professional work we handle is usually Japanese into English, so working from English into Japanese is unusual for us.

People who don't work on translation probably assume that it is a relatively straightforward task of transposing the literal meaning of the words accurately into another language. But of course it is much more complicated than that, and especially when it involves 'technical' content like observations on city planning issues. Texts like this contain a vocabulary - call it 'jargon' if you like - which is quite specialised and language is used in ways that don't feature in 'Standard English' - whatever THAT is! So we first make a 'rough cut' translation and then discuss line by line what the original contents mean, adjusting the text to reflect the 'shared view' that we have arrived at during discussion. Working as a couple the translation somehow emerges in the relationship between us. As we are both quite creative people this can be expressed in a pretty energetic, even 'explosive', process of negotiation a lot of which revolves around the basic emotion of "For God's Sake! Can't you understand what I'm trying to say?!?" in one form or another. The answer can often be "No! Do you even know yourself??" or at best you hope for "Who knows? I think so" And who does know? Translation is not an exact science, ultimately it really tests the idea of 'meaning' and if the author didn't know exactly what he 'meant' in the first place how can you expect somebody else to 'second guess' him?.

Then of course there is a final stage where Edera looks at all this from the perspective of idiomatic Japanese and the impact on the reader. This is the part of the process where the author just has to trust the translator. Your work is already in somebody else's world and you just don't know enough about the navigation there to steer the ship. You might have launched straight in with "Please send me sixteen 4mm self-adhesive widgets no later than the 23rd" but she might begin with "The autumn colours are beautiful in the bamboo thickets this year" and you just have to accept that it is down to culture and she knows best.

I say final stage but of course there is one more point that you influence even less - the actual meaning taken by the reader from the text you wrote. I once used to puzzle about the amount of ink spilled on 'deconstruction' by Jacques Derrida and others but now I see exactly what they meant. I think! Who knows what, at the end of the 'chain' some young Japanese town planner is going to take away from what I've taken such pains to write?