I’m a chemist, not a mathematician, but it’s still helpful to know German or Russian. Many old papers were published in German, and there’s a slew of stuff that shows up in the CAS Abstracts that appears to have only been done in the USSR. I’ve made my way through many old articles in Chemische Berichte or Angewandte Chemie or Liebigs Annalen with five years of mostly-forgotten high school and college German, an unabridged German-English dictionary, Babelfish for a starting point by machine translation, the benefit of cognates, and looking at the pictures. Organic chemistry has a language all its own, just like math does, but we do it with pictures.
Of course, these days there’s now a slew of stuff being published only in Chinese journals and only in Chinese. When I was looking for previous work while working on my MS, it seemed like the only hits I got of anything close to what I was doing was done either 40 years ago in the Soviet Union or relatively recently in China. The difference was that, while I could often get the old Soviet journals through interlibrary loan, no one had the Chinese journals, so all I had to go on was the English (and hopefully graphical) abstract.
Sure, there are journals in a number of other languages as well. I’ve either looked at or tried to get articles in French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Czech, Polish, Korean, and probably a couple other languages. Some, like Helvetica Chimica Acta will take submissions in a number of languages (Helv. Chim. Acta will take English, German, French, or Italian) and I’ve read old copies of journals that have a mix of languages (normally English, German, and French) but all the highest impact factor journals are in English. And who is going to pay to translate all this into English, especially something like a German organic chemistry article from 1890?
This is incorrect. There are many things a translator can do to verify the accuracy and correctness of a translation, from specialized glossaries and dictionaries to online communities, listservs, and forums where they can ask others with experience if they’re getting tripped up by a particular term.
Which mathematicians were, at one point, before they became mathematicians. They got their skills and knowledge through research and study, and there is nothing preventing translators from being able to acquire those skills and that knowledge as well.
Probably a lot less rare than you think. A translator who takes specializing in any given field seriously will make the effort to study that field. A translator who specializes in mathematics (as opposed to a mathematician that translates) may not have a degree in the subject but will definitely make sure s/he is able to understand the subject to discuss it competently with experts.
A certain je ne sais quoi, would you say? As shown by both Frylock and myself, the phrase ‘Х нет’ does have several quick-and-easy precise renditions in English, depending on the context in which it is used. Nothing ineluctable about it.
In the given context, yes, indeed, that is what it literally says.
I guess, people, that we will just have to accept that translators are all super-geniuses who can master all the most abstruse subjects, that other people devote their whole careers to mastering, with just a little bit of private study done on their own time.
Hey, I taught myself Russian in high school and was good enough at it by the time I got to Georgetown that I tested out of the first two years of courses my freshman year. If that’s possible with languages, why not mathematics, or finance, or geology? Self-instruction can and does work, and any decent translator is going to seek out those avenues in order to ensure their translations are of the best quality they can provide. There is nothing inherent in any specialized field that would prevent a translator from learning and understanding it enough to provide a good - or dare I say excellent - translation.
A course at Stockholm University called “Law for Interpreters and Translators”. It’s not part of a law degree program; it’s a course specifically designed to give translators and interpreters a grounding in Swedish legal concepts. There is no requirement that applicants possess a law degree.
Information on how to be an authorized legal and financial translator in Sweden under the Legal, Financial, and Administrative Services Agency. There’s a PDF at the bottom of the page that lists the requirements for being authorized; none of the three requirements are a law degree, whereas one of them is passing a test in which the applicant translates a legal text and the translation is approved by the review board.
So what we have here is a course for translators, who do not need to have a law degree, that appears to be designed to help them pass a test administered by a government agency giving them accreditation in translating legal documents - and the ability to render those translations as equally legally binding as the original. Again, without needing a law degree.
If a national government recognizes that a high-quality, legally binding translation can be provided by an individual with no law degree, then it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a translator with no mathematics degree but a similar level of study in the field can do the same exact thing with a mathematics translation.
Right, it’s not completely self-educational, but again there’s probably very little in the course material a resourceful translator couldn’t find on their own. And the larger point about not needing a degree in the field of specialization still stands.
Olentzero, both Law and Translation are in the Humanities. While I agree that a translator with a working knowledge of math would be wonderful for translating math, the problem (well, in my case, the advantage) is that most people who have trained as translators break out into hives when faced with technical concepts or subjects. You’re more likely to find a mathematician with a working knowledge of two languages than a translator who can do calculus.
I raised several points in the esteem of my Translation classmates when we had to undertake a text with some references to environmental issues. Things that were “in Chinese” to them (can’t say “in Greek”, one of them is a greek Chipriot) were familiar concepts to me. For once, being one of the two “techie freaks” was perceived as having value!
Yeah. In litigation, there are translators who are familiar with the law, and they are much better, but they are best when they really understand the witness, all of the nuances of meaning and argument.
Was hoping you’d show up in here, Nava. I’m well aware of where both law and translation fall as disciplines, but the reticence of your classmates to tackle highly technical subjects doesn’t conclusively prove translators need years of specialist training in order to successfully translate highly specialized material. (In fact, your own experience appears to be further evidence in support of my argument.) I used the examples of Stockholm U and the Kammarkollegiet because those were the first that came to mind; I plan on taking that course next spring and that test sometime in the next year or two. And the closest I’ve ever come to a law school is passing by Georgetown Law on the campus shuttle. Nonetheless it appears there is an avenue for translators, wholly untrained in law like myself, to produce translations acceptable enough to the legal community to be viewed as legally binding. Again, from there it’s not all that difficult to make the leap from a specialized humanitarian discipline to a specialized discipline in another branch of knowledge and recognize the potential for translators to achieve the same level of quality in a translation without the years of training. (Note, all, that I said ‘training’ and not ‘experience’.)
Flipshod, I believe you’re thinking of interpreters rather than translators if you have the spoken word in mind. Nonetheless I’m pretty sure I agree with your point, if I understand it correctly.
My experience that some 148 students out of some 150 refused to touch anything technical supports your argument that translators can translate math if they want to learn to translate math? My experience that 26 ES->EN students had been unable to find enough information on how to translate two common environmental science terms in two weeks, while I knew them without searching, supports that translators can translate environmental-policy news if they set their mind to it? I think I’m having a language issue here.
Let me try to restate. I’m not saying your experience proves my argument, I’m saying your experience doesn’t disprove it. Simply not doing something (or not wanting to do something) does not prove that you can’t do it - but it also doesn’t disprove that you can.
Providing evidence that a translator can gain a working knowledge of the law sufficient to translate legal documents has no relevance to the claim that they can do the same thing with math, because law isn’t math. What is relevant is people pointing out that, in actual practice, mathematics papers (when they’re translated at all) are translated by mathematicians who know multiple languages, not by translators who know a bit of math. If there are all these translators out there who can translate math papers, where are they? What are they doing, instead of translating math papers? Did they all just waste the time spent taking their math-translation courses?
That’s incredibly obtuse. My point, Chronos, is that translators can gain sufficient expertise in a specialized subject to provide high-quality translations without the fully specialized training of an academic in that same discipline. The content of that discipline has no relevance or bearing on a translator’s ability to gain sufficient expertise to do so. Yes, law is not math, but that fact does not prove that translators can’t get the knowledge and skills to translate advanced mathematical articles.
Misstating my position. I have not asserted - and if it appears so, the fault lies in my wording - that ‘translators who know a bit of math’ would be able to translate advanced mathematical articles. Research and study to grasp the concepts involved is necessary, but a PhD isn’t.
Translators, due to the nature of the work, need to find more than one area of specialization. I’m sure there are translators out there who do translate mathematical articles, but I’m also sure it’s not their full-time job. Nonetheless, my point of contention here is not whether there are or are not translators who work in mathematics, but that the argument “only trained mathematicians can translate mathematics papers, translators could never do so” is mistaken and displays serious ignorance about translating as a profession.
As an afterthought: the fact that translators can gain proficiency in one discipline without full formal training makes it more likely that similar proficiency is attainable in another discipline. (Not necessarily by the same translator, of course. I’m talking general principles here.)
No. No, they would not. As noted, I can become a legal translator without becoming a lawyer. Translators of mathematical articles can do so without becoming a mathematician. Law not being math says nothing about a translator’s ability to learn and understand and translate, and neither discipline imposes a degree requirement on the ability to translate.
Translators do not need to become fully trained mathematicians with a degree in the subject to successfully translate mathematics.
I still don’t see the relevance of law translation. It only takes the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree to become a full-fledged lawyer, while it generally takes a PhD to become a full-fledged mathematician. Why would it be surprising that it also takes more education to have a working knowledge of mathematics than it does for a working knowledge of law?
Here’s the thing that I think is causing a bit of a disconnect here: training in math and a few other highly quantitative disciplines is structured very differently from that in the humanities and other more qualitative fields. In something like literature, grad students are prepared to participate in seminars and consume the literature from the minute they receive their bachelor’s degrees. In math, which is an extreme example, grad students need at least two years of further coursework in basic facts that everyone knows before they’re even prepared to begin specializing, let alone doing research. A translator may not actually need a degree to translate an article, but they do need that background and an equivalent exposure to a mathematician’s style of thinking in order to even begin comprehending an article. It’s theoretically possible to get that outside of a doctoral program, but it’s not all clear how it would happen in practice.
I know that translators must understand the texts they are translating in order to do a good job, and I know that even I, a Ph.D. student in mathematics, need to work in order to understand research articles in my area of specialty, and don’t stand much chance with articles outside of my specialty. So this would make it likely that in order to be able to translate mathematical articles, someone must first gain a very good understanding of mathematics.
On the other hand, it may not be necessary to understand perfectly every step of a proof to translate it from a language to another. So I’m sympathetic to Olentzero’s contention that an imperfect understanding of the text might be quite enough.