Languages are like big gelatinous monsters that grow, absorb and morph into weird shapes, and it’s the translator’s job to make sense of wobbly language matter and try to reconcile it with the wobbly language matter of another species, a fun activity, for the most part: it’s still rife with stuff that consistently makes the translator’s life worse, and that’s our topic today. Sorry, people, I usually write about language history, but this time, I’m going to complain about work!
Unfortunately, I can’t produce my Language Specialist World Domination Central Committee Library Card (come on, I’ll get in trouble just mentioning it) as credentials, so let’s just assume I’m trustworthy enough when I say that I studied English, Spanish and Linguistics at uni, and have been a freelance translator for more than ten years, during the last five of which it has been what you could call my full-time job. I translate from English, German, Russian, Latvian, Spanish and (when I’m lucky) Portuguese into English and Russian,1 and this sort of variety gives interesting perspectives… and a lot of stuff to gripe about, so let’s get naggin’!
Abbreviations/acronyms/etc./whatevs.
Alright, the best way to start is always with a big nasty baddie. Abbreviations don’t take a lot of thought to understand why they are absolutely horrible for a translator: if you don’t know what they stand for, you’re in huge trouble. Thankfully, we’re not living in the stone age of twenty-something years ago, and we can look stuff up easily on the Internet. This leads to problems of its own, one of which should be evident to you if you’ve ever seen a Wikipedia disambiguation page. Abbreviations can have many meanings in many different fields: “NS” can stand for anything from “NATO Secret” to “Network Services” to “National Socialism”. And the right answer might not even be in what you find, it’s really a guessing game sometimes.
This is made worse by the fact that search engines often can’t grok certain kinds of abbreviations, such as those that introduce a hyphen to signify omission of a part of the word, commonly used in German: U-Boot (for Unterseeboot, submarine) or U-Bahn (for Untergrundbahn, metro/underground). Search engines refuse to see punctuation marks, and if you’re looking for something less than typical, you’re bound to get a whole load of nonsense in the search results. I am still haunted by a certain German C-Clipse, which I translated as “C-clip” years ago without having a clue what it meant. The client didn’t complain, but perhaps somebody could recognise the term? It’s a mechanical part in a car seat.
Anyway, another problem is knocking at the door already: what do you do with the abbreviation? Do you leave it or do you translate it? Obviously, the former is the only option if you have no idea what the abbreviation means, but otherwise, it’s very much a matter of context.
Let’s look at two examples. I recently translated a big batch of texts for a Latvian hockey club into English; it included player profiles, and one of the things they always indicate is whether the player shoots “left” or “right”.2 The original text abbreviated it, with “K” for kreisais (left) and “L” for labais (right). The choice is clear here: you know that the reader of the English text would be flummoxed by the “K” and “L” if you leave them as they are, so you put “L” and “R”, respectively.
The other extreme is slightly more irritating sometimes, because, sadly, it requires you to know stuff or look more stuff up than you’d like to. These are abbreviations established by some sort of convention, by common usage or even by law, like NHS or UN, or POTUS, or I/O,3 or FUBAR. The danger here is that you might not be aware of the convention, and not be prompted by context to look deeper into what abbreviation stands for, though even research might turn out fruitless, if the abbreviation is very common in a very obscure field or group of people, relevant to the text you’re translating: you might simply not find anything.
This is complicated by the fact that languages often accept abbreviations in other languages as theirs. Besides the obvious Latin examples (etc., viz., e.g., i.e.), there are things like UCI, which is in French, Union Cycliste Internationale (International Cycling Union, and nobody seriously says ICU); or take a look at German, which uses “USA” as the abbreviation for the United States, even though the country is called Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika (i.e. VSA, an abbreviation not in standard use).4
This means that you’ve got to carefully feel out what the abbreviation means, what context it’s used in, and, most importantly, whether the presumed reader expects you to translate it, or keep it, or… Perhaps you could hedge your bets a little and…
… Just spell it out? That’s a valid tactic if you know the meaning, but aren’t sure about the context: just replace the abbreviation with what it stands for. Or retain the original abbreviation, and give the explanation in brackets. This might seem lazy (often is), but sometimes, it’s effective: standard abbreviations of names of laws in German-speaking countries are often very distinctive and easily googlable, e.g. GmbHG (Gesetz betreffend die Gesellschaften mit beschränkter Haftung, Limited Liability Company Act), and since there are no official translations into English, you may leave the abbreviation as it is, with an explanation, and know the reader will be able to look this stuff up if necessary, and actually find it.
Alright, let’s get back to the awful things one more time: there’s another vile layer of brain-boiling obnoxiousness if you look at translations between Russian and any language that uses a non-Cyrillic script, because you always have to consider transliteration from one script to another, and while translating from, say, English to Russian, you may leave abbreviations as-is (even if it sometimes isn’t acceptable, such as in many official documents), in the opposite direction, there’s no such luxury.
Given that the Cyrillic alphabet is much less common and known, you’ve got to transliterate the abbreviations no matter how impenetrable and obscure they are, or you’re risking your client bombarding you with messages, asking why there’s still ШРУС, РСУ, РНН and НИИЧАВО left in their text.
Orthotypography
Anyway, it’s time to look at something different and a lot more arcane. My spell checker underlines the word “orthotypography”, and I’m not particularly surprised: it’s a pretty specific field of knowledge, which we deal with all the time, actually; it doesn’t concern the language itself, more like the written culture surrounding it. It’s about the way we use and lay out punctuation marks and other special typographic elements within a text.
What do you use as the decimal separator, a dot or a comma? How do you group digits in big numbers, in twos or threes (1,000,000 or 1,00,00,00)? And what do you use to separate them with? Commas, dots, spaces, apostrophes? How many dots there should be in an ellipsis? What kinds of quotation marks do you use? Primary and secondary (for quotes within quotes, whoah). How do you capitalise words? Why did you put a space in front of that colon you … you … Francophone person !
This is all terribly language, dialect (hello-o, English!), and even style-specific, and whenever you go from one language to another, you can’t avoid stepping into some of those messes along the way. Take the decimal separator: it’s consistently the dot in English, you can clearly read 100.000 as “one hundred”. It’s the comma in pretty much all of the rest of the European languages, so 100,000 reads as “one hundred”.
Now if we consider the marks that separate groups of digits in, say, German or Spanish, we have the dot, so 100.000 is ‘a hundred thousand’, the number that you would typically write down as 100,000 in English. I… I guess you can see the potential for trouble here. In practice, there are plenty of people who write texts and who don’t know anything about this, or aren’t sure or don’t care to be at least consistent, and just dot and comma away, leaving the translator, the editor, or in the worst case scenario, the reader to figure this stuff out.
As usual, English can be a source of pain on its own for a translator, and if different clients ask for British/European/Commonwealth spelling or American spelling, you’ve got to keep track of all the fiddly bits, too. Is it Mr or Mr.? No or No.? I said: ‘Those “experts” know nothing’ or I said: “Those ‘experts’ know nothing”? Capital or no capital after colon?
Anyway, since I’ve mentioned capital letters, let’s talk about German, and its well-known peculiarity in that it capitalises all nouns and even verbs acting like nouns in all situations. So, vorgehen is always a verb (to proceed), and Vorgehen (procedure) is a noun, at least in the middle of a sentence. The problem with this is that it sometimes makes detecting proper names very difficult. You expect proper names to be capitalised (a rule, which applies in German), and since they often consist of nouns, you run the risk of seeing things that aren’t there and not seeing things that are.
This is made worse by the fact that English terms are frequently borrowed by German as-is, and are subject to the noun capitalisation rule. So you can easily find something like ‘Application Server Solution’ in the middle of corporate guidelines or a manual in German. So how should you interpret this? Is it a generic term that just happens to be in English, and thus shouldn’t be capitalised, or is it the unique name of a specific solution, or even a trademark, in which case it should be? Both options do happen, and while context and Google usually help, they create a grey area that isn’t too good for your grey matter.
Oh, and if you need an even more esoteric example for dessert, think of the common practice of capitalising important terms in contracts, articles of association and other legal documents, to make clear that it’s that specific Client, Shareholder or Tentacle Manager we’re talking about, and not any generic client, shareholder or tentacle manager from planet Shlobulus. Does German care? It doesn’t. It can’t! It’s all capitalised anyway! Kunde, Gesellschafter, Tentakelleiter! Boo-hoo-hoo, dear translator, figure this one out yourself!
Whew, that’s venting! But hey, it’s not over yet, there’s a part 2 still to come, and as we’ve already discussed weird accumulations of letters and squiggly bits, next time, it’ll be all about words, and the various ways, in which they can spoil your day. Oh, and I’ll talk about why asking the client for clarifications is often a terrible idea. Until then!
1 Please consider all of the examples I provide here through the prism of the languages I’ve listed: I’m fully aware that there are plenty of different writing systems and all sorts of oddities in languages all over the world, but I’m sticking to what I know and work with personally.
2 I had to look all that stuff up for the project, because my previous knowledge of hockey was limited to playing the NHL 2003 video game back when it was new. It’s certainly one of the more enjoyable aspects of this profession: you get to look into and find out about things you’ve never considered or thought existed.
3 Editor’s Note: Even I, a native British English speaker, had to look up “I/O” to see that it means Input/Output.
4 In fact, more often than not, USA is translated: США in Russian, EE.UU. in Spanish, ASV in Latvian, EUA in Portuguese.
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