What Makes a Good
Translator?
Translation is interesting and enjoyable on the one hand and difficult, challenging and even infuriating on the other. It is never easy to be a translator. We know that every line or trade has its own standard of qualifications. What are the requirements for the practitioner of so demanding a profession as translation then? What, indeed, makes a good translator?
Among all the good qualities that are found in good translators we may identify at least four essential ones: language proficiency, good knowledge of the subject matter and strong knowledge-acquiring capabilities, sensitivity and critical-thinking ability, and commitment to work.
We have been learning or using English for many years. But since English is a language so different from Chinese, we can never be so cocksure of what an English sentence or passage really means without being crystal clear about its syntactic and textual structure as well as the lexical and grammatical meanings of the expressions it contains. We might take the English auxiliary verb “shall” for an example. Grammar books tell us that in modern English “shall” is used to express the future tense in the first person. But in daily usage, we rarely say “we shall ...” or “I shall …”; instead we often say “we will ...” or “I will …”. The word “shall” is found to be more often than not used with the second and third persons to form a future or conditional statement expressing the speaker’s will or intention. It may or may not carry stress on it. With stress on it, it expresses obligation or compulsion; without special stress on it, it expresses a promise or threat. If unaware of this special grammatical meaning the word carries when used with the second and third persons, we would hesitate or err when translating the following texts:
You `shall do what you are told.
叫你做什么，你就做什么。
You shall not catch me so easily next time.
下次你不会这么容易就抓到我了。
If you work well, you shall have higher wages.
你如果好好干，就可以加工资。
You shall die. (= I will make you die.)
我要杀了你。
To be proficient in a language means not only to master its grammar and vocabulary, but also to be familiar with the idiomatic ways of expressing things in the language. This requires the translator to understand a sufficient number of dialectal or stylistic variants in the language, including not only formal or literary expressions, but also jargon, slangs, euphemisms, jocular sayings, etc. For example, when somebody says in Chinese that he or she likes to “煲电话粥”, we should know that the guy likes to chat for a long time on the phone. To give this Chinese slang an idiomatic and stylistically equivalent English translation, we have to know such colloquial or equally slangy English expressions as “to do marathon talk on the phone” or “to shoot the breeze on the phone”. “商量” in “爱你没商量” is a Chinese slang, meaning “没有争议的余地”. So the phrase turned into English should be “I love you, no ifs, ands or buts”. If rendered into English as “... unconditionally”, the relish of the original would be totally lost.
It is worth noting that by language proficiency is also meant one’s competence in the target language. Many Chinese learners of English love to use the word “introduce” as a translation of the Chinese word “介绍”, but “introduce” is rather formal a word in English. It is actually more idiomatic to render the idea of, say,
我想向你们介绍一下我们的学校。
into English as:
I’d like to tell you something about our school.
than:
I’ll give you a brief introduction to our school.
And we should also know that in English people introduce a person, but not so often a place or thing. For the介绍 of a company, a university, a government agency, etc. native English speakers use the word “profile” instead of “introduction”.
The rapid economic development in
In a communicative act involving the use of language (as translation really is), language is a means or tool by which something is communicated. In most circumstances, what is communicated or, the “communicative content”, is something outside the realm of language. Obviously, to communicate effectively, the participants in a communicative act must share some knowledge of the subject matter of their communication.
It is exactly because good knowledge of the subject matter of the original is one of the essential requirements of a good translator that some university translation programs in Europe and the United States require or strongly suggest that the students take a group of courses in a specific subject area, e.g. the Bachelor of Science program in Translation Major in the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University in the United States stipulates that the student taking the program must complete a Subject Area Specialty module, which is a departmentally approved coherent sequence of courses in one or more other disciplines and which accounts for as many as roughly one third of the total credits needed for graduation from the program.
Since a translator may need to translate a variety of things and since human knowledge is to a great extent interrelated, the translator is desirably something of an all-rounder. Ideally, the translator should be as knowledgeable or erudite as possible, knowing something about everything.
In the translation of the following sentences, relevant subject matter knowledge is essential:
We bombed the Axis
我们轰炸了轴心国在欧洲的统辖区 (not: 轴心国的欧洲)。
Sensing that this might be similar to the
Israeli war on
叙利亚的领导人感到此事可能同1956年以色列为了苏伊士运河问题而发动的战争（not: 以色列对苏伊士的战争）相似，因而请求其他阿拉伯国家信守誓约，给予援助。
In present-day Chinese, “-化” is a frequently used suffix. “Such-and-such a -化has almost become a vogue expression. To translate expressions ending with this suffix properly into English, one has to have knowledge about the object or event the expression is used to denote:
经济全球化 economic globalization
国际关系民主化 to exercise/practise democracy in international relations
科研成果产业化 to apply scientific research findings/results to industrial production
教育产业化 (to build) a market-oriented education
知识社会化 (to build) a knowledge-driven society
国民经济信息化 (to build) an information-based national economy
保证决策的科学化、民主化 to ensure that the decision-making process is scientific and democratic
Of course, it is impossible for any person to know everything there is to be known. It is possible, however, to know how and where to find things out. It is worth remembering the old saying that “two (or more) heads are better than one”. To research a subject and talk to specialists or other translators, the translator usually needs to set up “temporary informal networks”. It is advisable to keep records of who you talk to on a given subject, or names of organizations to ring. You never know when you may need them again.
A translator’s knowledge consists of three parts: knowing; knowing where to
find out; knowing how to find out where to find out. (Picken [Ed.], 1989. The
Translator’s Handbook. 2nd edn.
If you are translating something related to computer technology and you have a term that is quite new and you cannot find it in any reference book available to you, e.g. “virtual reality”, you should know how to find out where to find it out. You may try, e.g. two ways: either you may go to consult a computer person to beg him to tell you where to find out the meaning of the term; or you may resort to the resources available on international computer networks (e.g. the Internet). You may know, for example, that such famous portal websites as Yahoo, Sina (新浪), Alta Vista, Infoseek, Hotbot, Google, and Vivisimo provide powerful engines to search for useful websites. So you may first get to the home page of one of these portal sites and use its search engine to find out various websites which may possibly contain information about virtual reality. By clicking on any of the so-called “hyperlinked” items in the search result list, you will be taken immediately to a site where you may browse to find the information you need.
Professional translators must have a near-perfect understanding of the subtleties and nuances of meaning in one language, culture and context in order to convey the same meaning in a different language, culture and context. They need to have a sensitive heart and an analytical mind. These are especially important when they mediate between two widely different language-cultures such as English and Chinese. To translate, e.g. the English saying “It is a wise father that knows his son” into Chinese, a translator should reason with himself why a father who knows his son should be described as wise: since not every father (far from it!) may be judged wise, the saying seems to suggest that not every father knows his son. So it should be rendered into Chinese as:
难得有父亲真正了解儿子。
instead of:
*了解儿子的父亲是聪明的父亲。
In translating literary texts, the translator needs to be keenly aware of the overall mood of the work, the atmosphere of each scene in it, the full implications of the conversations, as well as the writer’s temperament and spiritual tendency as mirrored in the work. Otherwise the original may suffer from serious deformation or distortion. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, there is a scene in which Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle who has killed Hamlet’s father and usurped the throne, calls Hamlet “my son”, at which Hamlet speaks aside:
A little more than kin, and less than kind, (I,ii)
Several famous translators came up with different translations of this line:
超乎寻常的亲族，莫不相干的路人。(朱生豪)
亲上加亲，越亲越不相亲。(卞之琳)
比亲戚亲一点，说亲人却说不上。(曹未风)
比侄子是亲些，可是还算不得儿子。(梁实秋)
比亲戚过了头，要说亲人还不够。(孙大雨)
说不亲亲上亲，说亲又不亲。{张今}
Considering that kind in earlier English means both “related by kinship; of kin” and “natural; in accordance with nature or usual course of things; (of persons) lawful, rightful” (OED) and therefore produces a punning effect in this context, and that kin and kind are related to each other by alliteration, only 曹未风’s and 孙大雨’s versions can be praised because they are up to the original with respect to these two important nuances of meaning of Hamlet’s loaded reply to his uncle’s calling. A probably better version may be derived from these two ones by combining their strengths:
比亲戚过了头，说亲人却说不上
More important than all that is discussed above is the translator’s commitment toward his work. For any translator, knowledge and talent is finite, and yet the problems and difficulties he may encounter are virtually infinite. Only a professional spirit marked by dedication and a strong sense of responsibility may prompt him to go to all lengths to ensure the maximum faithfulness of his work to the original.
* *
To sum up what we’ve discussed above about what makes a good translator, we may cite a translation scholar-cum-practitioner’s point of view of what a translator should be like.
Eugene Nida is a famous translation scholar as well as a translation practitioner who works in the capacity of a translation consultant to the United Bible Societies. He frequently describes what a professional working in that position should be like in the following way:
Nida’s View of What a Bible Translation Consultant Should be Like
(1) a keen intellect with a sense of structure and scientific imagination;
(2) a capacity to communicate effectively with others;
(3) a fundamental empathy with the cause of communicating the Good News, and with those who do, and a willingness to work closely with all kinds of Christian groups;
(4) a warm personal touch and a sense of humor
with which to relate to others, and not to take himself too seriously.
(Black, M. & W. Smalley. [Eds.]. 1974. On
language, culture, and Religion: in honor of Eugene A. Nida.
Nida’s description of what a bible translation consultant should be like, which is actually his own portrait, should apply equally well with a good bible translator and, by extension, a good translator in any field. It goes without saying that a qualified translator should have a good command of the languages he works with and be familiar with the subjects matter his translation involves. But apart from that, he should also need to develop a sophisticated sensitivity to diverse experiences and circumstances, a keen analytical ability to approach the most complicated phenomena in a rational way and, above all, a commitment to or, in Nida’s phrase, “empathy” with the enterprise of intercultural communication to which translation is indispensable.