English - Polish Translation of English Courts Names

As a predominantly legal translator, I decided to share with you some knowledge on law and legal language. This is why this blog is going to seethe with English and Polish legalese and with advice on how to deal with it. Hopefully, it will be of some use to those of you who struggle with the language of law as well as to novice translators who will find it as a good source of reference.

The first post of the series will feature the names of the English courts, their jurisdiction and Polish translation. The names will be put in hierarchy from the highest court to the lowest.

Here we go!

Hierarchy of English Courts (source: www.hmcourts-service.com)

English Courts hierarchy and their jurisdiction in Polish:

Translation (style) guides – guides to nowhere

In the translation industry, it is common practice for the clients to issue style guides that aim to provide a translator with specific instructions to follow when working on a project. These guidelines identify the purpose and the target audience of the translation; they may also enlist the terms that must stay in the source language, e.g. trade names. In essence, the purpose of style guides is to instruct the translator on the issues specific to this particular project.

Unfortunately, more often than not, this is just theory. Experience shows that clients misunderstand the role of translation guidelines making the following mistakes:

1.      They are written as if for beginners/amateurs.

Some of the style guides I received read like a study book for aspiring translators. It seemed as if the client wanted to educate the contractor on how to do the job. For example, they explained general rules of translating technical texts, giving examples of bad translations and comparing them with the good ones. This is basic knowledge that you could include in the first chapter of a book entitled “Introduction to Translation”. If you hire a professional to do a particular job, trust them. They should know their craft and be able to provide a high quality product. And if they don’t, teaching them the basics won’t help, neither will providing examples.

 

2.      They are too lengthy.

Mostly for the reason mentioned above. Extensive guidelines of let’s say over 20 pages with general instructions are a waste of time both for their writer and the reader. Unless there are special reasons behind such a lengthy guide, clients should limit themselves to a minimum. The bottom line is the shorter the better. Remember the KISS rule? Use it whenever you draft a style guide for translators.

The drawback of long guidelines is that reading them takes up too much precious time that could be otherwise spend on translation. Moreover, with so much information to digest, a translator may miss some of the important points.

3.      They do not take into consideration intricacies of the target language.

Each language is governed by its own rules. Take for example Polish - the language I translate into. It hates repetitions, whereas style guides repeatedly (pun intended!) instruct to use the same terms in one sentence or paragraph. In Polish, it sounds particularly artificial and simply horrible. Except for technical terms, almost every word has a few synonyms that very often have the same meaning and can easily be used as a substitution making the target text a much more pleasant read. The same can be said about pronouns, which are excellent to limit the number of repetitions. Still, clients insist that if a given term is used in the source text, it must appear in the target one the same number of times. I understand that consistency is key when it comes to terminology but the mental health of the reader is equally important.

Now a bit of a guidance to those drafting the style guides:

1.      Be brief. Lengthy guidelines take up too much time to read and are much more difficult to adhere to. Simple and concise instructions will do a much better job.

2.      Focus on specific instructions, avoid general advice. Professional translators know their craft.

3.      Don’t tell the translator how to translate. You’re in a client – contractor relation not a teacher – student one. If you are afraid that the project will be done by an inexperienced translator because they accepted a 0.02 USD per word rate, your ‘study book’ will not help at this stage.

4.      Be flexible. Bear in mind that some of your guidelines may not work in a particular language. In this case, you might want to listen to translator’s instructions especially if it’s their mother tongue and you are not particularly familiar with this language. Not saying that translators are always right, but they are aware of the intricacies and rules that govern the language they translate into.

5.      Respect translator’s work. By providing decent style guidelines, you’ll show that you value their work. In return, you will receive a top-notch translation exactly according to your instructions.

Translation done by language learners? I don’t think so...

/picture: New Yourk Times/

“Translation can be done by anyone” - this idea appears to have become a general misconception which has been ravaging the translation profession and exasperating its representatives. The world has already admitted that translation cannot be done by machines. Now, Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo, thinks that language learners would make excellent translators. How wrong Mr. von Ahn!

It is tempting to think that if you know a foreign language, you are able to translate. Why not? If you know what a word or a sentence means in a foreign language, you can easily convert it into your mother tongue. You can for example start translating correspondence at a simple level – saying what the author of a letter meant. Straightforward as it sounds, even a simple letter can pose a struggle, as there’s the tone, feelings and unexpressed intentions that need to be taken into consideration, meaning that the translator needs to read between the lines and skilfully render its sense in another language, really anyone can do it?

Another misconception about translation is that it is just a matter of finding words in a dictionary. Well, in that case everyone can flip pages of a lexicon and have a random pick from a word list. How would a language learner know which word to choose if three or more have a very similar meaning? Only professional translators can pick up on these subtleties and render them in the target text. The choice of words in translation is not determined solely by their meaning but equally by the register, tone, context and cultural background for that matter. Surely, studying a foreign language is not enough, unless it is supplied by pragmatics and applied linguistics.

Now, in the light of these facts, imagine that an army of language learners will translate the web, i.e. texts that you will later on read, gain knowledge from and sometimes even rely on. Inaccurate translation, poor language and lack of cohesion will definitely make the websites content deteriorate linguistically. And since we are exposed to the language of the web on a daily basis, it will influence the way we communicate.

The philosophy behind Duolingo was explained in the New York Times some time ago. The author of the article says that “ For online content providers wanting translations, Duolingo offers, for now at least, free labor.” – for now? Does it mean that in the future, companies will have to pay even for translation done, with all respect, by people who can’t do it?

Now consider this: “Because it is still in its early days, there are no independent assessments available of how accurate or efficient it can be.” No one will assess accuracy and efficiency...hmmm Essentially, you’ll be buying a pig in a poke. And I mean buying because: “People and companies can submit their content to Duolingo for translation, a service the company may begin to charge for.”  Seriously, would you agree to be operated on by a 1^st year student of medicine and pay for it?

Mr von Ahn – the founder of Duolingo explains its philosophy: “You’re learning a language and at the same time, helping to translate the Web. You’re learning by doing.” Right, great idea but don’t make other people rely on what the students of Duolingo have learnt and more importantly, don’t charge anyone for that.

He also compared this idea to using machine translation, “Google Translate, by contrast, relies entirely on machines to do the work — and while it usually captures the essence of a piece of text, it can sometimes produce bewildering passages.” Well, on this one, I couldn’t agree with you more Mr von Ahn.

However, I am more than worried by reading this: “Mr. von Ahn is thinking of taking on Wikipedia as his first translation project.” – please don’t fiddle with Wikipedia! Too many people rely on it as a source of knowledge and reference source.

“For Duolingo to work well, it needs a huge crowd of learners. The more proficient they become, the greater the chances of accurate translations.” First of all, getting an accurate translation is not winning a lottery ticket; no one should speak of it in ‘chances’ terms. Secondly, by saying that translations will probably get better as the learners progress, Mr von Ahn actually said that at the beginning – when the learners are just beginners - the translations they’ll produce will be even poorer. You couldn’t ask for a better advert, could you?

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 [E1]http://nyti.ms/NQk4jK