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Friday, June 9, 2006. Issue 3429. Page 8.

Getting Your Translation Money's Worth
By Michele A. Berdy

Переводчик: translator, a highly skilled professional

I need a vacation. I know because the run-of-the-mill follies of translation and interpretation that I usually barely notice have been driving me nuts lately. I keep writing on different themes and how to tackle them in Russian, but maybe I should write a bit about what translation and interpretation are.

They are professions. The ability to translate is very different from language competence. If someone can understand another language or speak it, it doesn't mean he or she can translate it.

This means that you shouldn't hire your sister-in-law's friend's daughter who just graduated from a teaching institute with a major in English to translate your hotel guest information. Because if you do, she will write: In extreme cases turn to the reception service. The Russian guests know what to do (в случае экстремальной ситуации обращайтесь в службу приёма), but English speakers will have a hard time getting "in case of emergency, contact reception" from her efforts. Russian guests will also understand 12.00 – единый расчётный час, but English speakers will be baffled by "12:00 are a settling hour." Make that "Check out is at noon."


Or if you ask your teenage nephew -- "он знает английский в совершенстве" (he knows English perfectly) -- to translate Московская консерватория имени Чайковского, it may come out as the Moscow Conservatory in the name of Tchaikovsky.

When you hire translators, you should expect them to translate everything and not leave out the hard bits. So you shouldn't pay someone for rendering the phrase "the next stage is the road show" as: следующий этап -- road-show. It is also cheating to just transliterate. "Shopping mall" shouldn't appear in a Russian text as шопинг-молл. If you get a text with half the words highlighted by your spell-checker, you're dealing with an amateur.

You can also expect translators to find the accepted English spelling of non-Russian names and organizations, instead of just translating from Russian (or vice versa). That means that Всемирная организация здравоохранения will not be rendered as the All-World Organization of Public Health, but the World Health Organization. And the Chinese province of Хейлуйдзян will not be Kheiluidzyan, but Heilongjiang. A client should expect this even if half the translator's fee goes to pay the Internet bill for checking it all.

These might seem like minor annoyances, but examples of mistranslation are legion. I'll bet anything the folks who needed to translate the name of a recent student journalist competition didn't ask an experienced professional for help. So Russia Beyond the Headlines (Россия не по газетам) was billed as Россия Вне Стереотипов (Russian Beyond Stereotypes). If you didn't know better, you would think young Russians were all bizarrely obsessed with stereotypes about their country.

If you have an interpreter at a meeting, you should expect constant, complete translation. If you ever have to ask, "Why are they laughing?" your interpreter isn't on the job. Interpreters always speak in the first person, in part so the audience can tell if the speaker is referring to himself or someone else. If you hear "He said that ... " (Он говорил, что ...) -- you've got a novice. Get the hook.

And if you have a VIP coming to speak, hire a VIP interpreter. I know what American actor Richard Gere and Turkish author Orhan Pamuk said in Russia, but the Russian-speaking audience didn't always hear it.

Also make sure your translator knows the subject. There are no universal translators, so run from anyone who promises любой текст в любой области в кратчайший срок (any text in any field in record time). I may be a native speaker of English, but I can't tell a widget from a washer, so don't ask me to translate a Russian technical manual.

Although I did do a pretty good job on those VCR instructions, didn't I?

Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter