Stand By Your Translator

 
It’s an awful feeling when a customer is not happy with your translation. When it happens, it’s easy to feel like a total failure, almost as if everything that you’ve been trying to do until now was wrong but you were so dumb that you failed to realize it.

But even the best translator makes mistakes, and I use the plural here advisedly.

It’s an indisputable fact that St. Jerome, the man who translated the Bible into Latin 700 years ago, was one of the greatest translators who ever lived.
And yet, most biblical scholars agree that the word “horned” in the following passage from Exodus, was a mistranslation and that the correct translation from Hebrew to Latin should have been “his face shone”:

And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord. And Aaron and the children of Israel seeing the face of Moses horned, were afraid to come near.” (Exodus 34:29–30, D-R)

I am not a biblical scholar, but “shone” makes more sense to me than “horned.” As nobody caught this mistranslation at the time, Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses in Rome has horns.

A mistranslation does not by itself negate the value of the entire translation. Nor does it automatically mean that the translator was incompetent. It only means that out of many possible alternatives, the one that should have been skipped by the translator was in fact chosen.

The truth is, sometimes a client may also take an instant dislike to a very good translation for reasons that mostly have to do with the fact that the client does not understand how translation works.

When translators work directly for a client, they have a chance to explain themselves and sometimes even change the client’s mind. But when translators work for an intermediary (a translation agency), they are generally considered guilty as soon as a client expresses any misgivings about a translation.

Translation agencies should primarily look out for our interests because we are ultimately responsible for their financial success or ruin. They can’t make any money without us. Without us, they’re nothing. But many of them do the opposite – if anything goes wrong, their automatic reaction is: “Shoot the translator!” And they just wash their hands off the whole thing while stiffing the translator.

It happened to me just a few weeks ago when I was asked by an agency to translate advertising text on the front and back of Japanese credit cards. I accepted the translation as a minimum translation job since I was able to translate the text consisting of only a few words within a few minutes.

But the next day the agency sent me a long commentary from the client about my translation. The reason why the monolingual client did not like my translation was that it did not correspond exactly, word for word, to the English wording they had there. The original English information/advertisement must have been the original text that was then translated into Japanese. And the moron client thought that my translation should have corresponded word for word to the original English text if it were any good. But obviously, a pseudo informative but mostly advertising text, however short one, or especially a very short one, must be changed dramatically if it is to work in another language, especially when it passes from a language like English into a completely different language such as Japanese, with all its cultural implications.

The agency wanted me to work with the client and “fix” my translation (for free, by including the additional work in my minimum flat fee since they did not mention any payment.) But I simply refused to touch it because I didn’t see the point of trying to justify myself to a dumb client who knows nothing about translation. The way I see it, if the project manager didn’t understand what was going on – and she didn’t, because she never asked me anything, only ordered me to revise my translation – she too was an incompetent factotum.

So I told the PM, “Please feel free to ignore my invoice.” It was for my minimum flat fee amount, so I figured that it wouldn’t be such a big loss.

But at the same time I told myself that in spite of my offer, if I don’t get paid for my work, I will never work for this PM again. I did not get paid and I will not accept another job from this person again. It is too risky to work for people who value your work at zero dollars and zero cents as soon as something seems to go wrong. There are other people in the same mid-size agency, four of them, who I have been working for already for a number of years and I will continue working for them. I have a feeling that they would have understood instinctively what was really going on, or at the least that they would have insisted on paying my paltry minimum in this case. You can’t simply stiff a translator just because a client has no idea what the word “translation” means.

I was in fact lucky this time because I only lost a few minutes of my time while translating a few words, while I was able to confirm my suspicions about this particular project manager (I already had my suspicions about this person.) Had I accepted a long job from the same PM for another ignorant client, the loss would be much more painful because I would either have to work with an ignorant and arrogant client, or lose much more money.

If arguably the greatest translator who ever lived—and who was later named patron saint of all translators by the Catholic church in recognition of his work—could make a major mistake that later led Michelangelo astray (arguably the greatest artist of all times), when he was creating his statue of Moses, the chances that mistranslation will never happen to you or me are approximately 0.000.

I will contrast the case above with another example of a client who had a problem with my translation about two years ago. It was a translation of a long Japanese patent in an area that I am quite used to after more than two decades of working in this field.
But more than a year after I finished the translation and received payment for it, I received an e-mail from my client, a partner at a major patent law firm. He said that when he took my translation of the long patent with him to discuss technology related issues with the opposition in Europe, the counsel representing the other party pointed out what the opposition identified as problems with my translation.
The issues that the opposition had with my translation were attached to the e-mail, several of them, as the patent was very long.

Let me tell you, dear readers of my silly blog, reading the e-mail and the attachment was pure agony for me, and not only because I’ve been working for this client since the mid 1990s and chances were I was going to lose him now. Fortunately in one sentence, burnished in my memory even now, my client said ” … although I defended your translation vigorously…”

So I responded by humbly apologizing for any problems my translation may have caused and offered to go through the translation with a fine tooth comb, word for word, and address all of the issues that the opposition had with my translation … at my usual hourly rate.

My offer was accepted. I saw that the opposition had a point in some of the objections expressed to my translation, although more than half of them were in my opinion arguing about how many angels can dance on the tip of a needle. But I did not put it like that, of course – I merely suggested that while an alternative interpretation was possible, due to differences between Japanese and English grammar, so was mine.

It took me a long time to read and proofread everything as I was careful in trying to address every one of the points that the opposition made about my translation as diplomatically as possible.

I put five hours of work on my invoice. It took me longer than that, but I decided not to push my luck. And I was paid for the additional five hours of work by the law firm, which keeps sending me work. In fact, I see in my records that in May of this year, about 40% of my income came from the same client who sent me several long Japanese patents for translation.

Some people are smart enough to stand by their translator even when a client raises objections to a translation. And some people think that the best, most convenient and fastest solution is to shoot the translator first, and wash their hands off the whole thing afterwards.

It’s a fast and convenient solution, but not necessarily a smart one.