For whom do you translate?

Just read an interesting piece on writing for money, and what it entails. One passage that stood out to me was this:

I’ll let you in on a secret: One of the primary reasons I am as successful as I have been as a professional writer is I don’t take my frustrations out on my clients and editors. My clients and editors tell me that one of the things they absolutely freakin’ hate about writers is that they’ll ask a writer to do something in a certain way, and the writer just won’t listen. He or she will want to do it another way, and will then get all pissy and moody when they’re told “no.” Because they’re creative, you see. They have this vision. And it should be respected.

No. No. No.

Not that I mind, of course. It just means more work for me, since I listen to my clients and I have no ego about the writing process — save doing the job that needs to be done, and doing it right and quickly. I let the client know that I have opinions, and I offer them if they’re interested, but when they’re not, I don’t take it personally. It’s a job. It needs to be done.

This ties in very nicely to the act of translation (which is, after all, just one flavor of writing). There are translators out there who agonize over the words they put on the page—a good thing, since it shows that they care about what they present and how it is presented. But some of them let this agony carry over into the postdelivery stage. That’s much less professional.

You do a translation, you polish it up to the best of your ability, and you proudly attach that file to a mail and hit “send.” And it doesn’t end there. The client will make corrections to your beautiful document. “We always write GLOBOCORP in all caps. We insist on using certain CSAs (Company-Specific Acronyms), and hey, we like to capitalize the terms that are the source for these abbreviations. We have a Plan Business Department, not a Planning Department; look, it even says so on the English side of my business card.”

Now of course the translator doesn’t need to roll over and accept all of this without a word. In certain cases his name is going to be on the final product, and no professional wants to sign off on something full of “lovely life for you in the 21st century” Japanglish. So there are still steps to take. As John Scalzi says, this is the time to “let the client know that [you] have opinions, and . . . offer them if they’re interested.”

Just about every translator can do this. Who wouldn’t speak up and point out stupid “corrections” to work that took so much sweat and brought about so much RSI? Rarer are those translators who can strike a balance between educating a client on what really needs to be changed and what would be nice, from the point of view of a talented native writer of English, to see done differently.

It’s the client’s money. Once GLOBOCORP pays you for your text, it’s GLOBOCORP’s text. The firm gets to mangle it as is wishes; you’ve done your job. You’re being a professional. Like Scalzi, you “don’t take it personally.”

There are some clients out there—my favorite ones—who will listen eagerly to all the input you have on the writing process. They are generally the most knowledgeable about what translation entails; they know the difficulty of writing on-target text that meets their needs while conforming to style rules (which, they admit, you know better than they do). In these cases the translator’s job goes beyond translation and becomes something like “linguistic consultation.” It’s fantastic work. When I get to do it I feel valued, and I get to produce perfect stuff in collaboration with a client throwing money at me to do so.

But not all clients are in this category. Client education—those suggestions that all translators are capable of making—helps push them all in that direction, but they aren’t all going to get there. Not anytime soon. So keep pushing, but don’t develop those pushing muscles to the point where your talent for recognizing that other truth atrophies: “It’s a job. It needs to be done.”

05/19/2005 | work | Comments

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