Prof. Richard Finks Whitaker is the director of Maestría en Traducción e Interpretación Inglés-Español at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara and despite all his efforts a video conferencing was not possible. Therefore, he so generously wrote his wisdom and advice as follows. Luis, Kenia, Addy and Zara would like to extend a great thank you to Mr. Finks for his kind contribution and for sticking with us eventhough the going was hard. "Mr. Finks, this blog would not be the same without you".
I. How many years have you been a translator?
In a way, I suppose that I have been translating ever since I began my formal studies of a foreign language over forty years ago. Back in the mid-1960’s, particularly in the part of the world where I did my undergraduate studies (the American Midwest), foreign languages were taught following the “grammar-translation” method—and most of what we students did consisted of studying the grammar of the target language and doing written exercises that involved translating.
Of course, for all that I acquired my admittedly limited knowledge of French by carrying out simple translation exercises, I did not perform professional translations involving a second language until several years later, when I came to Mexico to live and began to learn Spanish.
II. How did you become interested in translating?
My interest in translation dates all the way back to when I was a very young child. In the early 1950’s, my mother belonged to something I believe was called the Around-the-World Gift Club. Every month, she received a small example of one of the native arts and crafts of a different country—an ebony elephant from what was then known as Ceylon, a hand-painted urn from Greece, etc. These “gifts” came wrapped in packaging that almost invariably consisted of sheets and scraps of newspapers from the corresponding land. These wonderful samples of scripts I couldn’t read absolutely fascinated me; I remember eagerly awaiting the opportunity to spread out the crumpled newsprint and ponder the inscrutable texts.
In those years, also, there was one particular international crisis that received a lot of television coverage from the United Nations. I was fascinated by the fact that the speakers at the U.N. were earnestly communicating in tongues I could not understand at all—and I loved listening to the interpreters provide versions that made all the sense I couldn’t myself extract from what was being spoken.
When I was eleven, I accompanied my parents on a trip around the world, and that experience changed my life in many ways indeed. One immediate result was that I found myself suddenly in the midst of cultures where everyone but me, it seemed, understood what was written on signs and menus and what was said in the hotels, shops, and streets wherever I went.
I became convinced then that I wanted to learn lots of different languages. Although I always knew I would be a teacher, I recall that there was a time in junior-high school when I was asked to prepare a major project on what I wanted to do professionally when I was older—and I did my report on becoming “a language interpreter.”
I didn’t have much opportunity to turn that sort of dream into a reality in my small hometown in Missouri, where at the time foreign languages were not taught in schools until the final years of high school (and Latin was the main offering there), but I knew that being able to communicate in a living language other than my native English was something I deeply wanted to do.
Most of my life since has followed a course that traces my attempts to be able to do this.
III. Would you say that there is a demand for translators; in other words, how big is the market in Mexico?
The smaller the world becomes—or, to put this another way, the larger our global community becomes—the more obvious it is that there is a very real need for people to communicate accurately and effectively across the barriers that different languages and cultures represent.
There is a very considerable market for quality translation and interpretation work in Mexico.
I heard on the news just this week that tourism is the second most-important source of income for Mexico (the first being the oil industry). It is understandable that a country like Mexico, which is such an attractive draw to tourists from around the globe, has a constant need to provide first-rate translation-interpretation services to its visitors.
But Mexico does not need translators-interpreters only to attend to its important tourist industry. Modern Mexico daily interacts with a huge range of countries around the world, and the lingua franca of much international interaction is English. It is not for nothing that Mexico is increasingly developing bilingual education programs in English and Spanish in order to better prepare its young people to take an increasingly broader role in world events.
In Mexico today, it seems to me that the skills of the competent, professional English-Spanish, Spanish-English translator are in constant demand.
IV. Based on your experience or in your opinion, how big is the market in Quintana Roo?
On very many counts, Quintana Roo is an especially privileged place. It certainly should represent a major market for professional-quality translation-interpretation services. The region’s remarkable wealth of natural wonders as well as its incomparable archaeological attractions makes the state the destination of choice for a huge number of English-speaking tourists from all around the world—and especially from the United States and Europe. The fact that Quintana Roo shares a border with an English-speaking country (Belize) also underscores the importance there of English-Spanish, Spanish-English translation. And one should not forget that throughout the region excellent translators-interpreters are needed in other languages as well—starting, quite logically, with Maya.
Over a dozen years ago, when I first had the opportunity to visit the University of Quintana Roo, I was greatly impressed by its lovely campus in Chetumal, by the excellent faculty of the English Language Program there, and by the bright, dynamic students I met. I vividly remember being given a lovely brochure about the university and being extremely favorably struck by the superb quality of the English text throughout. It may seem curious, but the impact of the splendid English of that attractive brochure has lasted over the years as one of my first strong impressions of the excellence of the UQRoo.
In my opinion, very many of the materials in English for tourists to Quintana Roo (folders, brochures, guidebooks, etc.) prepared under the auspices of the government of the state and of its Ministry of Tourism have been published in superlative English. This suggests that there is keen awareness there of the value of top-quality translations.
Naturally, there should be a considerable demand for continuing and expanding translation-interpretation services of quality to the benefit of businesses and the service industries throughout the region.
V. How can you obtain a government license to translate official documents in Mexico?
As regards the government-authorized translator in Mexico (perito traductor), I believe you will find that the procedures and requirements for obtaining this appointment may differ from one state to another. In general, you would do well to check with the Supreme Court of Justice (Supremo Tribunal de Justicia) for the state where you are interested in working, in order to find out the particulars. There may well be specific times during which applications from those interested are invited, and you will want to pay close attention to the announcements pertaining to the call for applications (convocatoria) and the steps and deadlines involved.
VI. Is it hard to obtain?
Government authorization (peritaje) to carry out translations that can be regarded as official will understandably require meeting the criteria established for evaluating one’s qualifications to perform the important tasks involved. The specific requirements for obtaining this authorization in any given state will need to be met.
VII. Do you think that innovative computer translating programs could completely replace human translators? Explain?
Even in our technology-driven society—and perhaps especially in this technological era—it remains my conviction that nothing can replace the human translator.
I am aware that several programs designed to provide assistance to the translator exist, and I do not doubt that in particular those that aid translators in organizing, storing, and accessing information of use (for instance, in the preparation of glossaries of specialized terminology, data banks of phrasings previously employed, etc.) can prove to be invaluable tools.
Yet computer-assisted translating is not the same as computerized translation. The human role in the translation remains essential. All kinds of wonderful examples exist of how common computer-translation features on personal computers have led to errors that no human translator would have made.
I believe that we should employ the services of whatever mechanical or electronic aids actually may serve us well in our work, and there can be no doubt that computers have greatly facilitated our professional performance. But I also sincerely believe we have little to fear about being replaced soon—and, O.K., I’ll risk future embarrassment by going so far as to say probably ever—by non-human devices that purport to carry out genuine translation processes.
VIII. Based on your experience, what was the hardest part of translation for you? Explain.
The “hardest part” of translation work, in my opinion, is the frequent need to work against the clock. Many translation jobs are understandably regarded by clients as “urgent”—and a stunning number of requests come in for translations that are needed not just today, or even right now, but (as clients often sheepishly tell us with a pleading look in their eyes) “yesterday.”
The problem for me, quite personally, is that I do not work primarily as a translator but as an academic administrator and professor; the time that I have available for translating almost always involves shifting priorities and making, not finding, time to dedicate to a given translation task. And personally, again, I do not work best under pressure. I find that translation work requires close attention, minimal distraction, and often the kind of resourcefulness and research only a certain amount of leeway in terms of due-date allows.
Clients do not always—or, generally speaking, often—realize how much work, research, and revision translation tasks call for. My favorite example of the kind of situation that I find “hardest” to deal with is this: I was once asked to translate (or perhaps “just” check the correctness of a translation for) a very short speech to be delivered in English at a large formal event. When I asked at what time this text would be needed, I was told that—uh, well, hmmmm . . . the speaker was already on the dais.
IX. What was the easier part of translation for you? Explain.
It is my personal view that little is particularly easy about translating—and one of the things I like best about doing translations is that every task I undertake, no matter how “routine-seeming” it may at first appear, invariably teaches me something new.
I can honestly say that I have never once done a translation for which, in the process, there were no surprises. Even a standard business letter or e-mail message of the sort I may have translated dozens of times before invariably contains something new for me to consider and tackle: a word I don’t have a ready equivalent for; a turn of phrase I have never considered the difficulty of matching; a syntactical challenge I haven’t previously confronted;—something.
I absolutely love this aspect of translation work. Should this word carry a capital letter? What would be the best way to handle this reference to a popular Mexican refrán for which there is no similar saying in English? Is the register (or degree of formality) in the original text adequately conveyed by the way I’ve worded things in my translation? . . .
It may seem that I am here describing the hardest part of translation—but, no. Hard as translating accurately and effectively can be, from my point of view dealing with all the surprising challenges that crop up is the easiest part of translation work, because what I most enjoy about translating is working successfully through the intriguing difficulties translating always poses.
X. Based on your experience what are some common errors that are made by translators? Explain.
When crossing from one language and culture into another, we all make the occasional unintentional slip. (At a local restaurant, instead of ordering chongos for dessert, I once quite calmly asked the waiter to bring me “una orden de changos, por favor.” That happened long ago, but it still makes me blush and laugh and shake my head in chagrin.) Some such errors are silly and embarrassing; others have serious consequences. All are regrettable. All should be avoided.
That said, I believe that inexperienced translators run the risk of making two kinds of mistakes that are based on misconceptions about what translation, as an activity, involves.
One basic error is to assume that, in order to be perfectly accurate, it is the translator’s duty to produce a word-for-word translation. There are instances (usually rare) when it may indeed prove advisable or even necessary to provide a translation for every single word in the original text, in the precise order in which each appears. But this is usually regarded as the very lowest form (or level) of translation work, and it seldom results in a version that is natural-sounding or fully comprehensible.
While the translator certainly needs to understand every word in the text being translated, it is his/her task to communicate not so much the words of the original as their sense. Expert translators as respected as Saint Jerome (the patron saint of translators) and modern practitioners of the art like Marina Orellana and others concur that what translators need to do is transmit the ideas encapsulated in the words of a text, and this often calls for seeking other ways of saying the same thing in a different language.
Another fundamental misconception of novice translators is that the translator is free to simply read a text, get the gist of it, and provide a kind of summary statement instead of an actual translation. While translators should work ultimately with communicating ideas, we must do so in words—and the words of the original text cannot be glossed over or dismissed.
I encourage student translators to view the words of texts in groupings of what are known as “autonomous units”—not isolated words, but the clusters of words that occur together in the original in short, syntactically bound phrases. The translator can then consider how each word cluster might best and most naturally be handled in the target language. Because in every language words have particular ways of being interwoven to communicate, it is best to look at word-clusters (rather than merely at each word individually) in order to see how best to convey the ideas represented by these phrasings.
In summary, then, I urge inexperienced translators to look at ALL of the words, and to deal with translating the ideas present in ALL of the groupings of these words in the original text. The good translation is seldom one that in the target language is a direct, word-for-word match for the original—and never one that merely proffers just a general overview of what the original text said. If we shouldn’t usually translate word by word, neither should we just pass off as a genuine translation an overall impression of what was said. (I am here referring to written translations. Interpreting works somewhat differently, yet in oral interpretation, too, one must not fail to stay scrupulously close to the contents and tone of the original remarks.)
XI. Based on your experience what are some false assumptions that people have about translation? Explain.
People who are uninformed about all that professional translation work involves often see translating as a simple clerical task. They assume translations can be churned out virtually automatically. The uninitiated tend to regard translators rather as if we were some sort of bilingual human fax machine: You slide an original text across the translator’s desk and on the other side out pops the translated version—just as smoothly and effortlessly and swiftly as that.
One of the tasks that professional translators today have to carry out is educating their clients (tactfully, of course) regarding the kinds of work involved in producing a reliable translation of professional quality.
Many people assume that anyone who knows another language is capable of producing a translation involving that language. (“My cousin spent two weeks at Disneyland last summer. I bet she could translate that for you.” . . . “My little boy is taking English and doing very well in his first course. I’m sure he could do this translation for you.”) Translating requires all sorts of specialized knowledge and skills. The general public has yet to fully realize, let alone acknowledge, this key point. Although translating, as an activity, has been going on for as long as speakers of different languages have needed to be in meaningful contact with each other, translation as a bona fide profession is still in the fairly early stages of gaining the kind of recognition and respect it deserves.
XII. Based on your experience what are some false assumptions or conclusions that translators have? Explain.
I would refer you to my response to the question before last. Inexperienced translators may tend to stick too strictly to the words and word order in the original text and thus produce a translation that lacks the natural syntax and “sound” of a text written in the target language. Also, no less mistakenly, the uninitiated may assume that the words in the original text can be simply glossed over; translating is not merely summarizing.
Another false assumption novice translators may make is that knowing the basic techniques and linguistic strategies involved in the translation process equates with being able to tackle any translation job. Translators need to be honest with themselves about the areas of knowledge that they master sufficiently well in order to take on tasks of translating in a given field.
If I do not have much knowledge of medicine or law, I have no business accepting translation work in these highly specialized areas. The expert translator of materials relating to computer programs will not be someone with merely rudimentary computational skills. Recognizing the fields one is knowledgeable enough in to do accurate translations for is part of the self-analysis each professional translator needs to do early in his/her career.
Also, students should realize that learning about the history and theory of translation can be valuable and is certainly eye-opening, but needs to be coupled with actual translation practice. It is like swimming. One doesn’t set out to become a lifeguard and then do nothing but contemplate the properties of water, study the physics of drowning objects, and reflect on how saving lives is a worthy, even noble endeavor.
If you want to be a lifeguard, you’ve got to get wet—dive into the pool, cross it lots of times in lots of different ways, splash around, and practice perfecting those strokes. Lives depend on the thoroughness of one’s practical training and firsthand experience in the deep end of the pool—not just at water’s edge.
XII. Do you use a special technique for translating or do you find a particular method more beneficial than others? Why?
Several recognized techniques, strategies, and procedures exist that are of considerable value in the study and analysis of translation work. Students do well to learn about these, for such aspects can illuminate the various processes involved in translating.
However, there is no single technique that is better than any other in all cases. There are particular strategies that work best for resolving particular translation problems, and certain other techniques that are worth applying in other specific instances.
Knowing that there are several ways to approach working through a translation should help the translator feel better prepared for tackling the tasks he/she performs.
While there is no simple formula that can be applied uniformly to all translation work, there are some basic initial steps that translators are probably well-advised to follow in virtually all cases. It is essential, for instance, to read through the complete text to be translated before beginning to translate. Familiarizing oneself at the very start with the document, article, etc., will facilitate the work ahead.
Also, before translating, it is always important to have a clear idea of the specific audience the translation is intended for and should be directed to. The translator will want to clarify this point with the client, since even before beginning a translation it is vital to know who its intended reader is.
XIII. Do you think that accurate translations are possible? Explain.
Accurate translations are indeed possible. They require considerable work and effort to achieve, but they are the goal of all professional translators. It is essential that a professional translation be faithful to the original in every way possible.
XIV. I have often heard people say, “The translated version was better than the original,” do you think that such comments are true/accurate? In other words, do you think that a translated version can be better than the original? Explain.
The best translation is one that reads as if the text were originally written in the target language. The goal always is a translation that is accurate in content, faithful in style, and reliable in conveying the ideas expressed in the original.
It is definitely not the translator’s job to try to “better” the original text.
There are certain kinds of translation work that may actually call for retaining—or at least indicating—errors in the original that the translator may discover while analyzing that text. Legal translations, for instance, need to conform precisely to what the original text says. And all translations, generally, need to avoid turning into adaptations of the original.
Still, in most technical translation work outside the legal arena it is considered part of the translator’s job to not preserve in the translation what in the original are obvious slips of a minor sort. (For example, when translating an article in Spanish about New York City, if in the original there is a reference to “Time Square” the translator should not perpetuate the error; in the translation into English, the mistaken name should be corrected to read “Times Square.” Similarly, if in a Spanish original a comma is incorrectly placed between the subject of a sentence and the main verb, the erroneous comma should not be retained in the English translation.)
Such polishing is considered within the realm of the translator’s responsibilities. (Nevertheless, changes of other than a grammatical nature ought to be brought to the attention of the client by the translator, since it does not fall to the translator to make alterations without alerting the client to the nature of these.)
One does occasionally hear that a translation reads more effectively than the original. This might be the case if a translator has taken care to express things with perhaps greater attention to matters of natural syntax or even of the basic mechanics of writing (punctuation, capitalization, etc.) than had the original author. A hastily written letter of recommendation in one language might well turn out to read “better” in translation precisely because of the care the translator has put into expressing in his translation the ideas perhaps worded more clumsily in the original.
Still, I caution translators not to strive to “improve upon” an original text. The goal is to faithfully represent the original—not demonstrate how much better a text might be if handled differently.
XV. What suggestions or advice would you give to our viewers who may be translators or are planning to pursue the career?
Giving advice is always tricky. Once one gets started, the harder it is to stop. Let me just share a few suggestions that leap to mind at this minute. . . .
I would encourage anyone interested in working professionally in the field of translation-interpretation to be aware that good translators-interpreters are always seeking ways to expand and perfect their knowledge—not merely of the languages they wish to work in but also of everything in the world around them. This is one occupation that calls for a very broad range of general knowledge, as well as for a very specialized grasp of the particular areas in which one chooses to work.
Every current event reveals fresh problems and challenges that should interest the attentive translator-interpreter. Keeping alert to the language being used to refer to the situations that arise in the daily news is one simple but vitally important way in which the translation practitioner can sharpen his/her basic linguistic tools.
Translators and interpreters need to read widely and constantly. They also need to be on a constant quest to expand their resources and build a personal library of reference works that can serve them well.
Translators-interpreters should approach their work with professionalism. Doing the very best job one can on every translation-interpretation job one undertakes is essential. I do not doubt that the conscientious translator-interpreter may do his/her best on a particular assignment today—and five months down the line, might actually handle that same task somewhat differently. We grow as we work. As we make a concerted effort to always do our best, we find that over time and with more experience, we actually get better. This improvement should please rather than trouble you.
And, at the start of your career, don’t get daunted by all you may not yet know. Consider that you are committing yourself to a profession that will constantly be instructive, if you take your work seriously.
And do, please, take your work seriously. The pleasures of this profession lie in doing hard work well—all to the benefit of others.
I often point out that translation can be considered in lots of ways: as an art, as a science, as a profession—and as a mission. While there is something satisfying in knowing that we translators have skills that can help others communicate across the barriers that different languages and cultures can pose, there is also something compelling about possessing such abilities. They rather obligate us to be of service, when we can, in the ways we are uniquely prepared to be.
And serving others, for all that this may involve very hard work, can be a gratifying as well as joyful way to spend our working lives.
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