The honeymoon is over!

I’ve completed my apprenticeship – five-years clocked as a freelance translator!

They say it takes at least five years to learn a profession - or 10,000 hours, according to Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers: the Story of Success, which claims it takes this long to become an expert or master performer in any given field. Glad to know I qualify (see “Portfolio” tab on this website).

Gladwell based his assumption on Ericsson’s research on expert musicians. Of course, no amount of practice can give you the edge over someone with natural-born talent. Meta-analysis by psychologist Brooke Macnamara and colleagues at Case Western Reserve University found a correlation between deliberate practice and skill, although practice hours predicted only 21% of the skill variation for music and 18% for sports. (coincidentally two leisure areas in which I have developed considerable expertise, alongside my writing skills, all honed at a very early age).

The past half decade has been especially intense and I certainly feel I’ve paid my dues – further honed my skills, got to know myself a little better, had a ball. I have revelled in the freedom of accepting or rejecting tasks at will from an infinite range of possibilities, thus gaining glimpses of walks of life I barely knew existed. I have learned perhaps more than I need to know about highly specialised subjects beyond my areas of expertise, incuding ballistics, fiscal shenanigans, model trains, and the arcane legal frameworks for Swiss real estate transactions. I have got to know certain regions in Europe, such as Bergenland, better than my own back yard. I have doggedly stuck to the discipline of deadlines and learned how best to distribute high workloads without losing my mind (and improved my yoga skills in the process).

All of which beats being a salaried employee.

One side effect is that I have become more acutely aware of my own value and skills. Not all translators are equal, obviously, but it has been puzzling to discover what sometimes passes muster as a translation. International menus and signposts offer a rich vein of hilarity. For example, “Decomposed Moscow mule” or, multilingually, “crema de verdura – it cremates of greenness – es äschert von unreife ein – il incinére di coleur verte”. And seen in a church, “Please do not upload the presbytery (favor no subir al presbiterio)”. As Julian Barnes said, “Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But,” he went on,“what sort of human should it be given to?” (For a full answer, see his highly entertaining essay on translating Flaubert, LRB Vol. 32 No. 22 · 18 November 2010 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n22/julian-barnes/writer-s-writer-and-writer-s-writer-s-writer. Also see my blog post on the Egypt Air Drew Barrymore “interview”and the pitfalls on back-translating from Arabic.)

Horses for courses. Reading and writing skills and tastes naturally vary widely. I don’t know about you, but I am pretty choosy about the books I read. They have to evoke a world and characters I am interested in engaging in. But, more crucially, I have to find a book stylistically appealing. There are literally thousands of excellent stylists, so why waste a second on a book I wouldn’t enjoy?

Take Alan Hollinghurt, for example. Practically every sentence in his novels is carefully crafted, a miniature work of art, a haiku of social nuance. The following extract from The Line of Beauty speaks worlds both about the middle-aged woman being described, Rachel, and the describer, Nick: “In Rachel’s conversation a murmured ‘mmm’ or drily drawn out ‘I know…’ could carry a note of surprising scepticism. Nick loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement; he longed to master it himself.”

My favourite authors all have an identifiable voice, such as the compellingly austere prose of Ishiguro; Paul Auster, who writes about the complexity of human existence; the liberal voice of Theroux, genial doyen of travel writing; Anthony Burgess, that master of dialogue and gratuitous cryptic musical references [link to Cyrano translation art.]. So much to feast on.

How can a voice be translated? Or a milieu, while retaining the pleasure for the reader of entering an exotic world? On this knife-edge of nuance my heart beats faster.

Of course, not all translations require this flair for style. Engineering handbooks, for example, (of which I have translated my fair share) would by no means benefit from a more literary approach. Glossaries in this genre are fixed, sentences are necessarily short and to a large extent predictable, hence apt for machine translation and post editing.

A less clear-cut example is the low level advertising copy of product descriptions, such as those on Amazon. Just how punchy does the description have to be? Can the translator enjoy a little creative writing in such texts? To an extent, yes. Amazon itself would like to largely rely on post-editing of machine translation, as it is economic, whereas less monolithic companies, such as ragwear, are keen to build a brand identity, a set of clear values, which requires tactful translation of cultural mores and expressions. As a translator, I have also felt it my duty to point out monumentally bad product names, such as the“hooker” sweat jacket. Branding requires personality – and my heartfelt thanks to Oxana Zeitler, whose book I translated, for teaching me so much on the subject. [link to Oxana review] Any entrepreneur who uses playful, humorous, witty or ironic copy to build a customer base cannot rely on machine translation.

Translation is a fast-moving industry and has changed quite a bit just in the past five years. Machine translation continues to improve and is becoming increasingly relied upon. Alas, however, or perhaps fortunately, machines have not become any more creative than they were in Alan Turing’s day. At the same time, commercially-driven search engines such as Google now yield noticeably narrower search results than, say, ten years ago, and open source dictionaries such as Linguee are now riddled with poor examples of usage, in stark contrast to a time when translation was in the hands of trained translators. All this makes background research for a generalist translator that bit harder. Thus translator glossaries and alternative search engines and archives offer promising ways forward.

So, how do I see the next five years for myself? Well, for one thing, until now, I’ve sat back and let people come to me, but by now I’m so sure of what I am selling I want to shout it from the rooftops. There are still tens of thousands of discerning clients out there who, like me, appreciate good writing and require sensitive translators who are socially intelligent, gifted and engaging writers.

I’m here for you!