Is Your Text Translation Ready, Eddie?

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With every crisis, old issues surface and new ones crop up—wars, famines, terrorism, natural or man-made disasters, all create their own communication problems—domestic, international, monolingual and multilingual, and where translation is involved, blame the translators. The COVID-19 pandemic is not special in this regard. Recently, there have been complaints that translations of information about the COVID-19 are not up to scratch and have failed to communicate the important message across the multitude of diverse ethnic communities in Australia (and probably elsewhere). But before we start jumping up and down in total hysteria about how bad translations are, let us examine the reasons for such an endemic problem of low quality.

Let us start with the assertion that low quality has become the hallmark of almost everything human beings do and produce. Total quality and the quest for excellence have long been abandoned in favour of the mantra “better done than perfect”. There is money out there and everybody wants a share of it—be that in services or products—and the bigger it is, the better. We have been living in a decade of a less than mediocre world. So, it is no wonder that problems such as the ones we have in translation are a normal occurrence.

Source-language focus original

Against this backdrop, it can be asserted that most if not all texts destined for translation are not written or designed with translation in mind. They are not translation ready, despite the claims that the message is written for a wider, more inclusive audience. But in most cases, they do not go beyond the he/she/they cosmetic adjustments. And once you have done that, you have made the message all inclusive, you would think, right? Errors of translation for the main part are caused by the original text not being amenable to translation, even text written in the so-called plain English. 

In a crisis, or in a crisis-mode operational framework, everything is rushed out of the door. Audio messages consider airtime and the cost associated with the length of the message. That is why we often hear spitfire delivery of text narration and voiceover. All source focused, linguistically, culturally and idiomatically, etc., with almost telegraphic writing, and no concern for the cognitive processing abilities of the listeners, let alone translating the messages into other languages and delivering the translations in voiceovers in the same rushed manner or in subtitles that flash in front of the viewers.

The texts are usually meted out to translation agencies, who largely send them out as is to their preferred translators, who are not necessarily the most highly qualified but are the most pliable and agreeable translators. The Yes Sir/Yes Madam ilk. Those who are willing to do the job at any price and cause no fuss about the quality and peculiarities of the text.

The same approach applies to other types of original text—factsheets, information guides, etc. Writer-centric, source-focused, with no regard for the translation processing requirements. At best, translations in normal circumstances are provided to the communities as lip service. And despite the fa?ade of quality assurance of translations that Australia woke up to just in the last few years, no one seriously cares about the quality of translation. I highlighted this problem at the launch of my book The Translator’s Guide in 2000. A coroner cannot routinely tell from an autopsy that the cause of death was a translation error!

During the gulf war, the Americans were proud to have their psyopers (psychological operators) as they called them, design effective surrender leaflets dropped over Iraq. While the original texts were designed to psych out or win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis, the translations, as I discussed then, failed to do the same, for one good reason – the original text was not translation ready despite the claims to the contrary (see Darwish, 2005 for the full discussion). Today, the same thing happens time and again. And then when the translation fails, we begin to hear shouts and screams in various corners and quarters blaming the translators, which may be right to some extent, in the same way as we now hang the blame on the corona virus pandemic for all the ills and woes of business and the failings of society. No exaggeration. Take a good look at business practices and you will see what I am talking about. It is a major cop-out.

The social context of communication

Awareness campaign communications are not just about text translated or otherwise. While the average English speaker in Australia will understand the microwaved messages and associated images and symbols (see picture), in a social environment and ecosystem that situates the communication in the larger context of the issues and problems being addressed in these campaign communications, the average Australians of non-English-speaking backgrounds (NESB) do not have access to the same extralinguistic features or artefacts that complement and consolidate the communication blitz. These include mainstream news, media and political debates and discussions, and community interactions, which are not shared by the NESB communities. In this case, relying solely on translation to communicate the intended message will fail regardless of how good or bad the translation may be. Shared knowledge and experience and intersubjectivity are factors that play a crucial role in communicating vital information in such a frenzied manner.

Certification and the Placebo Effect

The certification madness that has plighted the business world in general for quite some time now has also spilled over to the translation industry. The decision to move from accreditation to certification, while it has some merits in principle (See Darwish, 2000), it is being abused by self-imposed accreditation authorities to oversee and regulate translation qualifications. Like its predecessor, certification is based on a points system, which has spawned an industry of experts in no time. Translators and interpreters wishing to maintain their certification must take several courses provided by what is known as professional development providers. On the face of it, this is motivated by the prevailing misconception that if one takes a break from one’s job, they quickly lose their skills and become rusty like a retired boxer. Therefore, upkeeping the knowledge and skills acquired over the years is necessary for practising and supposedly maintaining or assuring quality. So, it is largely about content knowledge rather than processes, methodologies, frameworks, and standards. What is beneath the surface and behind the fa?ade is a money-making industry that for all intents and purposes has stunted the growth and development of the translation profession. It can be confirmed with utmost confidence that certification (alone, to give you the benefit of the doubt) does not guarantee quality. The latest barrage of complaints is evidence enough, without going through the myriad of faulty translations to prove a proven point again. To whet your appetite, a simple term in English, such as “drone” is frequently translated into Arabic as “guided airplane”, as if a drone is a jumbo jet or a 747-airplane flying overhead. 

How universities have failed their students

In normal and not in extraordinary circumstances, such as the current pandemic, providing multilingual translations across the NESB communities does not carry a great deal of weight. In most situations, anecdotal evidence shows that translation providers do not really care about translation errors or their messages failing to reach the intended NESB audience. Cost effectiveness is the primary concern, as long as no one notices and makes an issue of it and the work continues to flow into these providers from their clients. But why is the situation on the ground in such a shabby state?

In the typical western tradition of teaching translation, many educational institutions have adopted a juxtapositional approach to teaching translation. While they include comparative and contrastive linguistics studies in their exploration of translation theories and models, they mostly focus their workshops on juxtaposing source and target texts, with hardly any processes or methodologies to navigate and negotiate translation constraints and limitations, or to have a translation analysis framework that would enable quality assurance that would transcend the likes and dislikes of translators and checkers. This has been experienced first-hand, as a student, and as a teacher of 15 years. A bit of contrastive linguistics, a bit of ethics, a bit of translation theories and models, and a list of specialized terms and there you have it! And what the students are left with is a collection of fragmented knowledge that for the main part of their practice they struggle to reconcile. Caught up in a business world that does not give a rat about what they have learned at school, these translators soon become jaded and frustrated, as they have no choice but to toe the line of business.

Not only that, in the typical cronyistic fashion, universities offering certification-driven translation courses have been in the habit of hiring their graduates as teachers, who regurgitate the same garbage they have been fed. Fashioned in their teachers’ image, these generational chain teachers are no better than their creators or their predecessors. A model that keeps replicating itself and causing the same translation problems we frequently encounter.

A profession without standards cannot hope to reach a level of professional maturity that translates or converts (to avoid the confusion) best practices (should they become available) into standards.

Translating best practices into standards

A profession without standards cannot hope to reach a level of professional maturity that translates or converts (to avoid the confusion) best practices (should they become available) into standards. By the same token, the reverse is also true in the sense that established standards can be translated into best practices. Unfortunately, this has not happened in the translation profession, except maybe in limited areas. In the absence of standards and best practices, we end up with different translators following different “practices” and “traditions” producing dubious translations, with the controversial double-checker quality assurance system introduced a few years ago failing to guarantee quality and contributing to the current mess.

No translation, good or bad, complex or simplified, will solve ethnic communication problems or help to disseminate the message to its intended NESB audience if a large section of the NESB communities are, by their admission, illiterate in their own native languages.

Concluding remarks

At the end of the day, no translation will be able to eradicate illiteracy in communities of Non-English-speaking background (NESB). No translation, good or bad, complex or simplified, will solve ethnic communication problems or help to disseminate the message to its intended NESB audience if a large section of the NESB communities are, by their admission, illiterate in their own native languages. So, how can a translation communicate a contextless message to people who cannot read or write in their own languages? That is the crux of the matter. In a major crisis like the present one, translation-mediated communication will fail, given the disparate levels of literacy of the target audience, the varying levels of competency of the translators and the dollar-driven translation providers. Probably, what is more pressing is to provide interpreting services in the NESB dialects and send out bilingual crisis management teams to the NESB communities to explain, clarify, and demonstrate the messages, if only to narrow the communication gap while, of course, keeping the social distance.    

Work Cited

Brockmann, R. J. and Sinatra, S. (1995). How the Iterative Process Helped the Allies Win the Persian Gulf War. STC Intercom, Vol. 42, No 9, November 1995.

Darwish, A. (1998). Translation as A Decision-Making Process under Constraints - A Think Aloud Study. PhD thesis.

Darwish, Ali (2000), The Translator's Guide, Book launch, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Darwish, Ali (2004). How Arabic Translators Frustrated America's War on Global Terrorism. https://www.at-turjuman.com/papers.html.

? 2020 Ali Darwish. All rights reserved.