I’ve noticed for quite some time that often, when a non-English speaker is quoted in an English language news report, the translation seems “off” in terms of how a native speaker might speak. I’m quoting two examples below from recvent news events:
Fatah supporter protesting recent election:
“We don’t want to join the Hamas government. We don’t want corrupt leadership. We want reform and we want to fire all the corrupt.” Full Story
Saudi King Abdullah, on signing a joint resolution with india to strengthen relations:
“This is the first time I sign a joint declaration in the interests of strengthening Indo-Saudi Arabia relations.” Full Story
To my ear, these quotes–while grammatically correct–sound stilted and jarring. King Abdullah’s in particular doesn’t sound like the kind of polished speechifying I’d expect from a head of state. Of course I’m assuming they are translations from another language, though they sound like they could be verbatim from a non-native speaker.
My question for GQ is, what are the style guidelines for translating foreign language quotes in English language news reports? My suspicion is that the style sheet requires that such quotes be a literal as possible, but as anyone who speaks a foreign language knows, literal translations are not the best for conveying the subtleties of a language; these quotes therefore “suffer in translation”.
My ultimate question (probably better in GD) is, does the presense of stilted translations in news reports contribute to a false impression of people? The quotes above, for example, are from Arabs; does the stilted language used here contribute in any significant way to a bad impression of the Arab world? That’s likely an opinion question, so I don’t expect it to be answered here, but I had to express my interest in the question nonetheless…
It’s most likely that the quotes are using an interpreter, not a translator.
An interpreter does the translation on the fly. Thus, they tend to translate word for word instead of putting it into a more natural English format. Also, they may not know how a word fits into a sentence; often you can only properly translate an idiom or make verb agreement after the sentence ends. That’s too late for the interpreter, who has to come out as the sentence is being sadi.
Finally, since they’re doing it on the fly, an interpreter might misspeak and use the wrong verb tense because he’s trying to get the meaning.
A translator has the time to edit the words to make it seem more natural in the language he’s translating too.
Ultimately, an interpreter is a good version of babelfish: able to get the meaning across, but not concerned with style.
The translation could have been done by a non-native speaker of English. Translation is hard; interpretation infinitely harder.
Consider the following trivial phrase. The guy living across the street from me has a bumper sticker on his SUV that says, “Moins cher qu’une femme”. Trivial, right? No. The first two words could be translated as “Cheaper” or “Less expensive” (or even “Less dear”) with minor nuances of meaning. But the last word could be either “wife” or “woman” with more than minor change of meaning (especially to his wife). And this is one simple phrase in a language whose structure is relatively close to that of English.
I asked an Arab speaker how accurate a version of Bin Laden’s quotes we get, he replied that the language was so obtuse and open to different interpretations that translations were especially tricky - rather than interpreting at all we usually got a word for word translation. (This was back in 2001, in France.)
I know a lot about translating German. One of the killers is that for the oft-used plu-perfect form, the verb always comes at the very end of the sentence, so to translate on the fly you have to remember the whole sentence, waiting for the verb, so you can stick it in the middle of the sentence where it belongs for english grammer.
Then there are a lot of idioms that vary from language to language:
In english, we don’t want to buy a pig in a poke. Germans refer to a cat in a sack for the same concept.
We preach to the converted. Germans kick an open door.
My understanding is that Russian is far more idiomatic and tricky to translate than this.
If you make such conversions, the translation makes more sense, but it is less literallly what the origional speaker said…Does this make it more or less “accurate?”