Technical Translation Is Not Just About Translating Manuals

 

It is a sad fact that the ATA (American Translators Association) Chronicle, an almost-monthly journal for translators, continues to greatly underwhelm me just about every time I fish it out from my mailbox.

There were two long articles in the current issue that I thought might contain something useful for a freelance patent translator, which is what I have been for the last 26 years. One of them, by Mathilde Fontenet, a Swiss translator and reviser of French who has been working for the Translation Service of the European Organization for Nuclear Research Translation Service since 1991, is about technical translation. It has a catchy name “The Technical Translator: The Sherlock Holmes of Translation”, as it is attempting to shed much needed light on the complicated and somewhat ephemeral issues involving technical translation.

The other one by Arianna Aguilar, a “master-certified” court interpreter for the State of North Carolina, is titled “Taking Advantage of the Cloud”.  I plan to elucidate this tricky new technological development with my own thoughts on who is taking advantage of whom in a next post.

I tried to read the article about technical translation carefully because after all, technical translation, c’est mon métier. Mathilde Fontenet is a good writer, especially if her first language is French. She could also be a good motivational speaker or writer, rather than just a mere translator and translation teacher as she likes to say uplifting and inspiring sentences like “The greatest prerequisite for technical translation is the ability to manage uncertainty”. This is very true, but then again, this is also the greatest prerequisite for politicians, assassins for hire, casino gamblers, bookkeepers, zookeepers and beekeepers, and just about every other professions, is it not?

In my opinion, the biggest problem with her article is that she does not seem to realize that she is really commenting only on an infinitesimal subcategory of technical translation, and not on the actual subject of technical translation which is larger by orders of magnitude. There are many different categories of technical translation. A translator can spend a whole lifetime translating and revising updated operation manuals published by CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), but that does not means that these manuals represent the entire field of “technical translation”.

Had she prefaced her article by saying something like “this is what I think about technical translation, and in particular technical translation here at CERN”, this post would never have been written.

The problem is, she seems to be talking about technical translation in general, and technical translation happens to be a very broad field. As far as I can tell, translators who mostly translate patents and never translate any manuals whatsoever are also technical translators. That would be me, for instance. Translators who mostly translate articles from technical journals are also technical translators. That would be also me. Which is why I think that her advice to technical translators is, unfortunately, basically only useful to a translator who happens to be translating operation manuals, preferably for CERN, ideally to French.

Let me cite another short passage illustrating Fontenet’s quite narrow and restrictive field of vision:

“A notion quite foreign to technical texts is that of authorship. If properly written, technical texts do not contain any sign of the author or trace of subjectivity.”

Does she even know that patent applications, which are highly technical texts, list the author(s) on the title page, as well as the editor (which would be the patent agent or patent lawyer), and that articles published in technical journals are never published anonymously either?

Each of these fields of technical translation probably represents a larger slice of the entire technical translation market pizza than translation of manuals. Authorship is crucial to any patent application, and any translator would tell you that the DNA of the author of the text in a foreign language to be translated is finely woven as well as haphazardly scattered into the text of a patent application or technical article. You have to be blind not to see it.

Or let me quote another overly simplistic interpretation of what technical translation is supposedly about from the article in the ATA Chronicle:

”Technical texts aim to convey information in a completely objective manner in order to help the reader perform a predefined task.”

Well, some technical text do that, and it would be so nice if there were more of them. But she does not say that this should be ideally the case. She authoritatively postulates that this is so.

It is not. Unfortunately for technical translators, many technical texts slyly but very distinctly aim to achieve, at least partially, the exact opposite of conveying information as objectively and clearly as possible. Especially in patent applications, the aim is often to craft the wording of a very broad claim covering all bases for all possible future applications for a new method, technique, gadget or gizmo, while disclosing as little real, new information as possible, because such information disclosure would naturally tend to narrow down the scope of the patent’s claims. In other words, ambiguity and obfuscation can be a very valuable currency for patent agents who write new patent applications if they can get away with it. And many can do just that very well. These are probably the ones who are paid the best.

That is why, for instance, Japanese patent agents are so enamored of handy Japanese grammatical shenanigans so popular in the fascinating language called “patentese”, like the word もの (“mono”, which could mean a thing, a person, an item, or just about anything else), or the word 装置 (“sohchi”, which is a word meaning device, apparatus, equipment, installation, and quite a few other things), while German patent agents love words like “Anlage” (equipment, structure, construction, unit, system, and a number of other possible translations), and the French ones use “le dispositif” (device, system, apparatus, means, arrangement, etc.) as much as possible instead of saying what they really mean, etc.

When I started reading the article, I was hoping that there would be some practical information for novice translators who are eager to learn more about the wonderful world of technical translation. But unfortunately, I did not find much practical advice for translators in it. The examples of stylistically poor translations that I did find in there were interesting, but this is hopefully something that is taught at most colleges where new translators are being educated. At least this used to be the case when I was a young novice translator eager to learn the craft.

Certainly, some of the paragraphs in the article are quite interesting, but mostly in an abstract kind of way. But I think that they would be much more suitable for an introductory college class about subtleties of different styles in writing and translating, rather than for the ATA Chronicle which bills itself as “The Voice of Interpreters and Translators”, and not really as “The Voice of First-Year Foreign Language Students”.

I believe that throwing around word like “parataxis” under the heading “Elusive Micro-Relationships Between Words” is not going to help our talented, young colleagues much either. In case you did not know that, according to Meriam-Webster “parataxis” means “the placing of clauses or phrases one after another without coordinating or subordinating connectives”. Many languages use this handy techniques much more than French which tends to be somewhat “verbose”, for lack of a better term, not just English.

If you are a technical translator who did not know this word, now that you know what this word means, in case you never studied Old Greek, (which you should have), or never learned this word in college, (which you absolutely should have), are you a better technical translator now?