Translating is easy, so easy!... Or is it?

Hey Yvon, you’re good at English right? What does this say! Could you translate this word for me? Ask them this, or that.

Oh, you don’t know?... It’s alright, thanks.

Sounds familiar, right? I know. If you’ve ever been even slightly above average in terms of linguistic skills, chances are you’ve been asked way too many times to translate stuff on the fly, only to disappoint the other party when they realize it’s not like some magic you can cast at will, and that will give immediate results.

How surprising is that? Being a translator is an actual job, requiring an actual degree, and… gasp actual research as well!?

Who would’ve thought! Well, I guess most people who’ve been asked that kind of stuff, at least unconsciously.

When people ask you to translate things, they often give you a word or two at best, and hardly anything else, really. But think about it. How often is it that you can use a word for exactly one context, and not one more else? 

You can eat a baguette, but you can also lead an orchestra with a “baguette” (baton), or you can even eat with “baguettes” (chopsticks)!

Slowly but surely, you start to realize that translating words is a fairly easy and mundane task. People do that every day without much problem. Meeting your fiancée? Eating French Cuisine? Got a rendezvous tonight? Sure, those words are now commonplace now in English despite being French, but their meaning and their spelling doesn’t change. You’re reading French, using the French meaning and you still understand it! The core meaning is there and you can re-contextualize it by associating the idea behind the word with an actual word or even the actual concept, in a language you understand – in this case, English. That is also the gist of the translation process and it happens almost automatically in your brain when you read those words.

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure goes into details about explaining this concept in his book (that he didn’t actually write!) “Course in General Linguistics”, coining the terms “Signifier” (the tangible manifestation of a concept) and “Signified” (the actual concept).

Of course, it’s not complicated enough just yet. So, we often throw in more nuances into the mix. Language is alive and ever-changing. New words are created every day, words are given new meanings, re-imagined. While you won’t have to literally take into account every single individual variation of a language, you will still need to think about who you’re translating for – the target audience, and how to choose the most pertinent translation. The most eloquent example of this is the Internet's slangs. That’s slightly cheating since the Internet is often at the forefront of neologisms, but hey, it still counts, right?

Let’s take a look at this for example :

You can already notice a few weird things appearing here and there. For most people - unaware of such sang -  it already sounds like a new language altogether. When trying to translate slang to another language, it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint exactly what tone to use, and once you do, how exactly you should translate this. Some are fairly instinctive to guess – “Hol up”, or the very seemingly normal “Shit man”, but some are very obscure references for the uninitiated – like “F”, which is a reference to the video game Call of Duty. However, even knowing this, can we safely assume that every language will have an exact or even approximative equivalent to those terms? For a more grounded example, Japanese usually refers to the color “Green” as “Blue” (青 , Ao). It’s quite obvious that the translation here would prefer to switch from Green to Blue to keep with a Western logic once translated, but in essence, the mere fact that the same concept (Signified) has multiple physical, real-life manifestation (Signifier) brings a lot more nuances that are essential to understand and be aware of, and that most people who are inexperienced with translation often ignore.

Researching in what contexts a word is used (and more generally speaking the subject of your translation) makes up the better part of your time spent “translating”. Of course, you can translate anything just fine – it’s your job after all, but it’s not your job to know about everything life has to offer and it’s not humanly feasible either, and that is perfectly fine.

Context is key to fully understand what you are reading, and thus properly translate and convey the core message. So, next time someone just randomly asks you to translate something, you can kindly send them this article to educate them about the basics of translation with a very rough crash course on the translation process.

Yvon C.