Translations International

By Greg Bathon

I’ve been lucky enough to have lived and worked for a long time outside the United States-in Europe, in Asia, and in South America-and I’ve seen hundreds of American executives coming and going in the international marketplace.

And in my view most of them did just fine without the help of the culture cops, who feed on the notion that it just won’t do for dumb Americans to be let loose among the sensitive souls in older and more civilized societies until they’ve been through a boot camp of costly culture-study programs.
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Experts will tell you that the Spanish language is such a babel of conflicting idiom that you might as well forget about communicating clearly unless you write specifically in the Spanish of your target country. Only Mexican Spanish for the Mexicans, and so on.

The experts apparently neglected to inform Cervantes of this notion. And Gabriel García Márquez. And Jorge Luis Borges. Not to speak of McGraw-Hill, with five publishing divisions and thousands of titles in Spanish. And the authors of the many school and college textbooks that have for years been in common use by students in every Spanish speaking country in Latin America, and in Spain.

The experts are plainly talking nonsense.
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You may manage translation projects, but chances are you have never actually spoken to a translator.

We’d like to introduce you to some of ours. But first, there are some things you should know about translators.

FACT: most professional translators work by themselves, for themselves. 95% (this is a good guess) of the membership of the American Translators Association are independent contractors. Buy a copy of the ATA’s Annual Translation Services Directory, and you can study the professional resume of every translator in the country who has passed ATA accreditation. If you want to manage your own project, it’s not hard to find a translator. And it costs about half of what you would pay us.

FACT: the ATA lists 52 languages into which translators work from English, and 65 languages from which translators work into English. Remember that a translator only works one way - into his or her own, native language. So you can get Thai into English, but not English into Thai (at least from the ATA).

FACT: translators specialize. They’d better. The ATA lists 11 categories and 120 subjects, from Accounting to Zoology, in which translators say they are qualified to work. Now multiply that by a minimum of the target languages you might need - the Europeans, Russian, three oriental - ten, let’s say? That’s more than a thousand translators into those target languages. True, most translators have more than one specialty, but still, no language service can keep that many translators under one roof.
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Written by BETSY M. MAAKS and reprinted with permission from INTERCOM, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication. Arlington, VA U.S.A.

Some grammatical structures in English can pose problems for translators, particularly if those structures can be interpreted in more than one way. Murphy’s Law says that your reader will often use the wrong interpretation, resulting in mangled translations.

Spoken language allows supplemental methods-like voice intonation, facial expressions, and physical movements- to convey meaning. However, print communication lacks the support of those nonverbal clues. To ensure clear meaning, writers must avoid expressions that require supplemental, nonverbal clues. They must depend on good structure and correct grammar to communicate their meaning.

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