A PASSION FOR PLUMS

A PASSION FOR PLUMS João Roque Dias, CT in MOX II – What they don't tell you about translation by Alejandro Moreno-Ramos ISBN: 978-1-300-42676-9 Fifteen minutes into our first ever conversation, a colleague asked me if I knew a “good glossary about elevators”. ─ I have this very technical document about elevators and I don’t have a clue about any of it… How do we say “dumbwaiter” in Portuguese? Twenty-one centuries later, the famous sentence by Cato the Elder remains amazingly true: “Rem tene, verba sequentur” (Grasp the subject, and the words will follow). And yet, for reasons unbeknownst to me, many individuals posing as translators present themselves as “passionate for languages” and, more and more these days, holders of some sort of university degree in translation. Do they say anything else? No! And, that’s where the real problem starts. How can a client, say, a manufacturer of elevators, industrial boilers (or a producer of plums, it really doesn’t matter) select these people to translate their documents? Unbeknownst to clients, what they need is people who have a real passion (hence, a real knowledge) for their machines (or their plums) and, because of that, know everything about vacuum cleaners and plums. And, although it’s often not said or asked, clients need translators who, above all, command their mother language better than anybody else, and not just because they have a word processor that came installed in their computers. What clients don’t know is that an alarming majority of these “translators” haven’t even invested in a proper spell checker… I also wonder why other translators, who have spent all their adult and academic lives reading, studying, and learning about everything not even remotely related to sciences and technology go online or publish résumés announcing miraculous translation skills for advanced waterjet cutting machine instructions or CNC machines. In a Danish doctoral thesis from 1994 (Hoffmann), we can read this phenomenal aberration: “Such texts – as e.g. declarations of contents and instructions for use – refer to phenomena which exist independently of the language culture in which they exist – or are invented. We are dealing with totally predictable texts! They can be translated without linguistic intuition, completely mechanically.” Way back in 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher also claimed that “technical translation was a mechanical activity that anyone with a grasp of two languages can do”. Yes! We’ve all seen such “completely mechanical” translations “without linguistic intuition”, which disregard every rule of “language culture” that makes them useful to those who need them to earn their living, enhance their lives, and – o tempora o mores – just to make money. Simply put, they are predictable rubbish! Yes, it is true that one of the great myths of technical translation is that it’s all about specialized terminology. “Give me a glossary about anything, and I will translate everything,” say all the false Archimedes who populate every translator’s forum imaginable! They completely miss the point: to reduce technical translation down to the level of a purely terminological issue is downright wrong. In fact, in some subject areas and language combinations, specialized terminology is sometimes (not always…) the easiest part of a text to translate. In other words, the greatest problems come from the things that aren’t terminology-

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