Do I ever have questions when I translate a text? Of course I do, lots of times. As a translator, I have to be (or make myself) knowledgeable about the subject matter I’m working on. Linguistic questions come up. Sometimes the source text is not as clear as it should be and it requires high powers of deduction to understand the meaning. But translators have help: monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, books and magazine articles in the source and/or target language on the product or process in question. Internet searches for terminology in context – and much more. If all that fails, I can call a colleague, and if none of my colleagues is able to help, I can post a question in a forum or mailing list.
The ATA Chronicle, newsletter of the American Translators Association, has a column called The Translation Inquirer. I usually look at the English/German inquiries and I am often left speechless by what people (translators?) are asking about. Do they not have dictionaries? Have they no Internet connection? As an example, in a recent edition, the following inquiry appeared:
(G-E 5-09.5) In a manual about engine control, the mystery word Dongle appeared. Here is the context: Dialogsoftware (Diskette, Dialogkabel mit Dongle, Handbuch). What is it?
Is this inquirer kidding? Let’s just assume for a moment that this “translator” is so young that s/he has never seen a dongle in the wild, a simple check of the German Wikikpedia entry for Dongle would have given plenty of explanation plus photos of the thing. Clicking on English in the left box Andere Sprachen would have brought up the Dongle entry in the English Wikipedia, and the original question would have been answered. A search for dongle in google.de with the Seiten auf Deutsch option brings up a multitude of sources that show explanations and context, helping to confirm the Wikipedia information.
Mystery word? For me, the only mystery is how this ended up as an inquiry.
I have a feeling that the translation in question isn’t going to turn out well.
By the way, I think you missed out a big resource for figuring out what a text means: asking the author.
I’m with you with the amazement on how this is even a inquiry. Obviously the inquirer hasn’t seen this ad before: http://translationmusings.com/2008/10/29/lost-the-dongle/
And you even left a comment on this post – how fitting 🙂
I thought when they took a survey a few years ago about what readers/members thought they should keep in the “new” Chronicle that they would surely dump this column to which you refer. I was shocked when it continued to appear. I don’t get why that column even exists at all and takes up space….Along with your points, it is simply an anachronism in this day and age (discussions not timely at all plus being bizarre inquiries).
@Ryan: You are right, I should have included the author as an information source. For me, asking the author usually comes last, though. Not because I don’t value the author’s input, quite the contrary, but in my experience authors tend to take a long time to answer – their replies often arrive after my delivery deadline.
@Jill: Had forgotten about the ad and my comment. It was a funny headline…
@Eve: Anachronistic is a good word to describe it. I don’t know about the other languages; the German inquiries are often so obvious that anyone who is in the business of translating would easily have found the answer on their own.
You know, this reminds me of the PC magazine questions. I am still subscribing to a couple of magazines, Maximum PC is one of those. They are a little bit geekier than the average PC mag, and they have some fun articles.
I assume that the questions are picked by how likely other people would have the same question or how interesting the question is. Unfortunately, they sometimes drop the ball and publish a question that is so newbie and that any self-respecting geek knows, and the question is “I just bought a 500 GB hard drive, but it is only 465 GB – Seagate/Maxtor/WD are a bunch of thieves, they stole 35 GB from me”. Of course the answer is a lengthy explanation about number bases, bits and bytes and how a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes in OS language but 1000 in HD language.
Come on, you seriously have never heard of that? This is not the Video Professor teaching Mom how to use Word, it’s Maximum PC targeted at geeks and people who build their own…
@Susanne: The kilobyte stuff is confusing… Luckily there is help in form of a single, definitive standard: xkcd.com/394/.
I love the Translation Inquirer! It gives me the same warm-fuzzy feeling as hanging around with my brother listening to truckers on his ham radio. It’s a completely other mode of life. 🙂