That being sad human translators are very often under imense time pressure and that sadly leaves a mark on the translations.
To stay with hungarian example: in the original of Fifty Shades Of Grey Christian is a big fan of the band Kings of Leon. Somehow the translator managed to translate the band name as Lion King. Which drastically changed the vibe of some scenes. Most probably the translator wasn’t familiar with the band and had to translate it super fast.
Similarly in the hungarian translation of Harry Potter Slytherin's Locket was translated as Slytherin's Lock. And when in the next book the context made it clear that indeed we are talking about a locket not a lock they just changed the name of the item like nothing happened. :)
I love catching these little translation flubs. Japanese movie and TV subtitles seem to have quite a few, probably because of the aforementioned time pressure. For example, I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and "crown" had been mistranslated as "clown".
Perhaps my favorite subtitle mistake of all time is in the subtitles of Brooklyn 99. One of the characters talks about getting someone a "boogie board" (a small surfboard) as a present. This is translated as "electronic memo pad". I couldn't work out how that had happened until I googled "boogie board" and half of the results are for an electronic writing pad with that name.
I remember reading a French translation of John Crowley's AEgypt and there was a part where a building on a college campus is described as looking like "a Christian Science church" (referring to Mary Baker Eddy's movement that built round churches with domes especially in the 19th century). The French translator, perhaps unfamiliar with that mostly American religion, translated it as looking like a "church of Scientology" -- a very different reference!
I know it got a lot of praise, but I couldn't help but feel the English translation of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a bit awkward. Among the instances I distinctly remember, the phrase "boy toy" was used in some fairly awkward ways. While the awkwardness might be intentional or a failing of the original author, it accompanied some very alien-sounding prose that always made me feel it was a product of the translation.
"…human translators are very often under imense time pressure and that sadly leaves a mark on the translations."
I've worked in an international environment where technical conferences were common and where both speakers and audience members were from various countries. Whilst almost everyone had a smattering of English many speakers chose to speak in their native languages so they would not be misinterpreted because of their limited second-language skills. Thus conferences had to be equipped with simultaneous interpretation and numbers of interpreters who translated on-the-fly into several different languages, English being the most common one with both native English and foreign language speakers doing the translations. A similar arrangement applied to other languages.
What impressed me greatly is how very competent these translators are, especially so given that presentations were usually of a technical nature and that they were translating in real time. They had precious little time to think of context let alone time to 'beautify' the translation into idiomatic or technical English (I only wish I was that competent in just one foreign language).
One doesn't expect interpreters to be expert in every technical term or jargon of a specialist technical subject so occasionally some phrase or term would be translated in the literal sense of the words instead of the more usual lingo/jargon that we professionals use in English but that never mattered as the meaning was always clear.
Moreover, many technical words are similar across a number of languages so it's often easy to get the gist of what's said in a language at the same instant the translator is translating them. For instance, I've a smattering of French and German so I'd recognized some of those words from those languages without translation.
Even with limited second-language skills I'm acutely aware of the limitations of translations. I have several different translations of a few important works and it's very instructive to compare their differences. This is very evident when one compares differences in emphasis and phraseology between various translators, and it's even more so if one is able to read the original text—even if one has to struggle to comprehend it.
What's immediately obvious from comparisons is how difficult it is to convey the full meaning and feeling of a work over to its translation. Good translators not only have to be fluent in both languages but they also must be able to convey spirit of the original with empathy and feeling into the translation. In fact, I'm often surprised how accurate and sympathetic translations are to the original text given that often there are very different constructs between languages, it's a testament to how very skillful many of them are.
Still, when one has only the translation and nothing else to reference it to one must always be wary of the accuracy of the translated text. I've also some books that are translations from Classical Greece that fall into this category such as those translated by the 19th C. classicist Benjamin Jowett. As I've almost no understanding of Ancient Greek I can only go on Jowett's reputation that his translations are faithful to the texts. Of course, translations are always a second-best but unfortunately most of us don't have enough skills to do without them.
BTW, if one's not familiar with the difficulties of translating languages then considerable insight can be gleaned from a short and amusing piece titled The Awful German Language written by Mark Twain—it's Appendix D to his work The Tramp Aboard. Therein, he describes his experience learning German and some of what he deems as its peculiarities.
Nevertheless, he rightly explains how some German words aptly convey human emotions and feelings in ways that are more effective and suited to the task than their English equivalents. What he's saying in this context is that a translator must be skilled enough to craft and tailor the transition into English so as to not lose the full meaning and feeling of the German text. It's highly a recommended read and there are many copies of it on the internet.
(I'd add it's a shame Twain didn't write one about English. English is a damn awkward language with odd inconsistencies and many peculiar spellings that often drive native speakers to despair. All up, I'd reckon English would leave German in the dust for odd rules and exceptions. Any foreign-language readers who read this then you have my most sincere sympathies).
Sometimes translators make weird decisions. Ocean's eleven in Latam Spanish was "La gran estafa" (The great swindle), which to me sounded much more generic, then came Ocean's twelve and they called it "La nueva gran estafa" (The new great swindle). On the 3rd movie they had to give in and called it "Ahora son 13" (Now they are 13), losing the connection to the others completely. For the next one they didn't even bothered and called it "Ocean's 8: las estafadoras" (Ocean's 8: The swindlers).
Bonus: the original movie from the 60s was named "Once a la medianoche" (Eleven at midnight). I would have preferred they kept that name.
This is a nice essay, with an excellent example of the challenges and art of literary translation. But the author seems to assume that "computer translation" is limited to services like Google Translate or DeepL: put in a text, get a translation, with no consideration of the context or purpose. Properly prompted LLMs yield much better results and are already helping human translators produce better translations than they could on their own. Whether a completely automated workflow is possible for translating literary texts in an artful and engaging way—I don't know. But I wouldn't reject that possibility out of hand.
Addendum: The above comment has received at least two up votes and two down votes: in the hour after I posted it, I saw it go from 1 point to 3 points and back to 1. Perhaps people who disapprove of it could say why?
I've been out of the translation game for quite a while, but I remember there being more to translating as a profession than just communicating ideas from one language to another. Sometimes precision and consistency is needed; complex scientific manuals come to mind. I recall using translation tools (e.g., translation memory) being essential to providing quality translations. TMs would help ensure that the same terms were used consistently throughout the text, and that similar phrases were translated similarly as well. The TM was an essential part of the workflow, because the first line of translators would pass their translation and the TM off to an editor, who would make suggestions in the text and TM, and the translator would update the TM based on those suggestions. It's been a while so I might have gotten a detail or two wrong, but that's the gist of the workflow.
I'm curious what sorts of prompts can replicate this. Again, there's a lot I've missed in the decade or so that I've been out of the industry. Does translation memory now become part of the context window? Does the context window self-actualize with new translations? What sorts of prompts can help produce quality translations?
I didn’t say anything about translation memory tools, though, nor about maintaining vocabulary consistency. Those are not big issues in the type of translation I do now, though I recognize that they are important for many types of technical translation.
I actually don’t know how good LLMs are at maintaining vocabulary consistency even when they are provided with glossaries or translation histories. That deserves some testing.
I didn’t mention it there, but I have had quite a few discussions with professional translators about LLMs over the last two years. Their reactions and attitudes towards AI are definitely mixed, but I do know translators other than myself who are using LLMs productively as part of their translation process.
On this subject, it is worth reading Tolkien's letters to publishers and translators about the translation choices regarding his works. His philology comes into full play.
"Common phrases in one language don’t exist in another; cultural references in one country mean nothing elsewhere, and so on. This is why a computerized translation is fine for a bland business email but will utterly fail for a novel."
I'm sure it's going to be indistinguishable very soon, if not already.
Sure, translations work better for bland, unpleasant, and redundant text, regardless of purposes.
So if business emails gets creative and dramatic, there will be heightened need for resources and risk for mistranslations, or if a novel would be written like law text, there will be less ambiguity or processing cost. Or if were to be written relying on English-centric LLM, it'll do worse in languages other than en_AI.
Tech is evolving fast, and while current AI struggles with nuance, humor, and emotional weight, future advancements might surprise us. Maybe the best approach isn’t ‘humans only’ but a synergy where AI handles structure and humans refine the feel?
To stay with hungarian example: in the original of Fifty Shades Of Grey Christian is a big fan of the band Kings of Leon. Somehow the translator managed to translate the band name as Lion King. Which drastically changed the vibe of some scenes. Most probably the translator wasn’t familiar with the band and had to translate it super fast.
Similarly in the hungarian translation of Harry Potter Slytherin's Locket was translated as Slytherin's Lock. And when in the next book the context made it clear that indeed we are talking about a locket not a lock they just changed the name of the item like nothing happened. :)
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