Think of a translator at work. What image do you have on your mind? Is the translator male or female? What does the workplace look like? Which artifacts do you imagine surround the translator? In my thesis I argue that translating without computer and the internet has become unimaginable. Which, for those of you who are constantly engaged with Social Media, the WWW, and digital life, might not come as a surprise.
However, people still think about translators as bibliophiles, bookworms, sitting at their desks with dusty leather-bound dictionaries piling up around them. Au contraire, translation has developed into a highly computerized, digital endeavour. Not only in the software localisation business translators use various numbers of digital or web-based resources and interact with experts and colleagues online.
Still, there are some surprisingly traditional things going on in the industry. Example 1: I just received a message from the federal association of interpreters and translators in Germany (BDÜ) promoting a newly published specialist dictionary for banking supervision / Basel III terminology. It’s available as a P-R-I-N-T dictionary only! No CD, no e-book, nothing else than paper.
From my understanding, the BDÜ is concerned with making life easier for translators. And it is a common understanding that researching terminology and background information consumes up to 75% of the translation process. In the translation business, compensation is very low and translators have to be really quick in order to obtain a decent time-remuneration-ratio. So why is it that such valuable resources like this dictionary (I know Mr. Nespral quite well from my studies at the University of Heidelberg and he is very professional and has a alot of expertise in this field) is made availabe in form that is very time consuming and not state-of-the-art anymore by a publisher like the BDÜ, that considers itself as on the translator’s side?
Another example is this recruiting video from the Government of New Brunswick, Canada. It’s a lovely and congenial video and after wathcing it, I would love to work with them, but it creates a totally wrong image of the job (i.e. the translator’s job) they are recruiting for. Watch this video and try to find the little (computer) mouse. It’s not there. It’s only books, paper and pencil.
It’s high time to change the public image of translators and translation as a job.
I do literary translation. I’ve written about this a little bit including a post I made yesterday about my experience.
http://acidfreepulp.com/2012/01/10/what-ive-learned-from-my-first-literary-translation/
Hi AFP,
thanks a lot for commenting on my blog. I just read the post about your literary translation project and it was very interesting. I particularly liked the parts about the interaction with the ST author and others. And I would love to take a peek at the scribbles you made during the translation process
. When I observed the professional translators in my field study, basically all of them kept a notebook and a pen or pencil at their desks, but they did not use them while I was there… I also observed a literary translator and it was a true pleasure, following his thoughts and talking to him afterwards. Literary translation, to me, is the most artful and “natural” type of translation. I will follow your blog 
.
Cheers,
Marie
Marie,
It’s quite a strange process (at least to me!). I scribble my initial translation of the prose–more of a literal translation and eventually type it up. I have a program called Scrivener which I put all of my electronic documents in. This software allows me to use a split screen, so I can look at 2+ at the same time. Just like my personal writing, it goes through many drafts until I find “it”–be it voice, structure, rhythm. Although, the original of this particular piece lacked what the author was trying to get across in the German, she was pleased with the execution in the English translation. She eventually apologized for being nit-picky; she was probably just nervous to have some else work on her story.
I meant to add that besides traditional German-Language dictionaries, I also use Oxford’s Language Dictionary online that offers many many meanings and idioms that I might miss on my own.