I’ve developed an enormous respect for people that work in translation. With time I’ve got to a point where I trust myself to translate things from either German or Science-speak into English. Actually, as I have enough friends who need the freelance work (and are better than me) I tend to pass the majority of it on and just do the German to English jobs that are about science or design (i.e. those that I find interesting and are better paid to boot).
The people who I’ve always wondered about are those who translate poetry. I’m sure that there are some awful examples out there as well, but I’ve got a two-language edition of the selected works of Hölderlin before me, and it’s amazing, the translator has interpreted the poem and re-written it in English, it’s not a direct translation, more a transposition I suppose, but the English version captures the spirit of the work (at least according to my simple understanding), whilst managing to retain the same rhythm. It really is very, very clever.
I only bring it up because a friend asked me to translate the lyrics to “Geile Zeit”, a song by a German band called Juli that the radio has been playing to death since December, I decided to not just translate it so that he could understand what it’s about, but to actually try and fit the translation to the music. It’s an idiotically simple text and I thought it would be a good exercise. The direct translation took about 3 minutes, the transposition, well, took until I thought “bloody hell, it’s not as easy as it looks this, is it?” and gave up.
In the future I’m keeping my day job and just translating the odd, specific thing, where my knowledge of the field is actually valuable. I’ve added people who translate poetry onto my list of people I admire, along with simultaneous interpreters (with the possible exception of the guy on CNN who does Russian to English). I still want to know what those people who translate Portuguese into Finnish would actually do if the EU didn’t exist though.
Song playing as this was published: Catatonia “Stone By Stone”
Portugese to Finnish: my daughter and her friends produced a Finnish-Portugese glossary as a project at school (in England), with a bunch of F and P visitors. Honest!
I really should just drop this whole translation theme - and I can’t even get stereotypes of obscurity right either!
When I arrived in Germany, my exposure to the German language had been nonexistent. I quickly became known as that guy you have to speak English to. I did my best and over several months, I practiced and practiced sentences over and over again. Every time I used these sentences though, the person (even strangers) would look at me with disgust and immediately launch into English. UGH. (I probably shouldn’t ask how they knew “Bubble Gum” English was my native language)
I’ve been in Germany for over 10 years now and my German is terrible…….but I have sacrificed my learning of the Teutonic language, to help and teach every German I meet to improve their English……and normally the thanks I get for this selfless tasks is to be told I am a lazy English bastard. Typisch of the Dastardly Hun.
I plan one day to translate Urdu into German. One day very, very, very far in the future.