LECTURE 3. LEARNING TO BE A TRANSLATOR
Plan 1. The Translator's Charter 1.1. General Obligations of the Translator 1.2. Rights of the Translator 2. Translators’ Societies and Unions 5. The Translator’s Responsibilities Learning to be a translator entails more than just learning lots of words and phrases in two or more languages and transfer patterns between them; more than just what hardware and software to own and what to charge. It entails also, and perhaps most importantly, grounding yourself in several key communities or social networks, in fact in as many as you can manage — and as thoroughly as you can manage in each. Translators know how languages and cultures interact. Translators know how the marketplace for intercultural communication works (hardware and software, rates, contracts, etc.). Translators have to be grounded in many social networks, and will almost always know someone to call or fax or e-mail to get an answer to a difficult terminological problem — so that being grounded in the translator community gives you invaluable links to many other communities as well. Hence the importance of belonging to and getting involved in translator organizations, attending translator conferences, and subscribing to translator discussion groups on the Internet. But you should also, of course, be grounded in as many other communities as you can: people who use specific specialized discourses and people who don't; specialists at work, at professional conferences, and at the bar; people who read and /or write for professional journals, or for "general" periodicals for news, science, and culture, and/or for various popular magazines and tabloids; people who tell stories, things they saw on or read in the news, things that happened to them or their friends, jokes they've heard recently, things they've made up. Translating is, very much akin to other forms of reading and writing, telling and listening; it is a form of communication, a channel for the circulation of ideas and opinions, information and influence. And translators have a great deal in common with people who use other channels for circulating those things both within and between cultures. It is essential for translators to ground themselves in the communities that use these channels in at least two language communities, of course — this is the major difference between translators and most other communicators — but it helps translators to think and act globally to imagine their job as one of building communicative connections with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different social networks all over the world. Eugene Nida has written: - translation is transmission; - translators are links in the communicative chain; - translation is synaptic action in the global brain.
It is not particularly scandalous that few translators have been kings, princes or priests. There is even a certain pride to be taken in the fact that political and moral authorities have had to trust the knowledge conveyed by their translating servants. But how might the prince know that a particular translator is worthy of trust? It would be foolish to suggest that all translators are equally competent, that their fidelity corresponds automatically to what they are paid, or that their loyalty is beyond doubt. Some kind of extra-textual support is ultimately necessary. Perhaps the prince's confidence is based on a diploma from a specialised translation institute, references from previous employers, comparisons with other translators, or even on what the individual translator is able to say about the practice of translating, since theorization is itself a mode of professional self-defense.
1. The Translator's Charter (approved by the Congress at Dubrovnik in 1963, and amended in Oslo on July 9, 1994)
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