Miriam Hurley

Italian Language Division newsletter

Posted on July 19, 2019     2 Comments

I am pleased to have been on the editorial board and wrote an article for the relaunched newsletter for the Italian Language Division of the American Translators Association.

Read the whole newsletter here: Tradurre, Italian Language Division newsletter.

Here’s my article.

 

Faraway, so close – Drawing on our virtual community 

By and large, we translators work all by our lonesome — physically, at least. In the beginning of my career, I liked this. Having escaped the numbing landscape of cubicles in Manhattan investment banks, my ten-second commute seemed the height of envy-worthy luxury.

Now, almost 20 years on, my fantasy is a translator co-working space. We would all work harmoniously, independently or on joint projects, in a wonderfully bright, spacious office, with a fragrant garden for breaks (make that a vegetable garden for fresh produce), and an espresso machine always buzzing. My fantasy translation team would have a mix of great IT>EN translators, with a perfect array of specializations, talented EN>IT translators, and an English reviser. Areas of total silence would alternate with group spaces for brainstorming, kvetching, and general socializing. 

We would have a Head of Administrative Headaches, who would do all our invoicing, chasing down payments, haggling on our behalf, formatting Word tables, and realigning PowerPoint text boxes. There’d be an IT expert who would keep all our computers in tip-top shape, solving our computer problems while we went on coffee breaks. We would call out to each other for advice and inspiration. “Hey, what would you do for ‘artigianale’ in this sentence?” Every translation would be revised both by a native English speaker and a native Italian speaker and then proofed again.

Perhaps my fantasy life is too limited. Why not throw in a sushi chef and yoga classes while I’m at it? After all, this fantasy office is not so far-fetched. Co-working is a growing trend. In England, there’s the Brighton Language Collective, a co-working collective just for translators. 

 

But given the ever-irritating obstacles of geography, the free will of others, and the cost of rent, most of us are still tucked away in our home offices. Typical citizens of our era, we turn instead to scattered and/or virtual solutions. 

 

For tedious tasks that bring me unpleasantly back to my years as a word processor in banks, I’ve recently turned to Upwork (despite the ridiculous rates offered by self-styled “translators”). A nice woman in Ukraine fixes my footnotes for me. Administrative headaches I’ve yet to outsource (though I know translators who have bookkeepers). Coffee, yoga, and sushi are, as ever, outsourced to the coffee shop, the yoga studio, and the restaurant.

 

The biggest allure of the perfect translator co-working space is community, both in terms of plain old good company and for an intellectual putting together of heads. The flip side of being a free and independent worker can be being alone and isolated. 

 

Yet: “I hate team projects!” was one lament on a Facebook group of translators working between Italian and English (one great use of our virtual community is blowing off steam with the only people who can truly understand). Translation, of course, has a technical, exacting side and a creative side that takes writing talent and creativity to solve knotty problems. Team projects can be a pain when aligning technical matters, such as whether the comma should go inside and outside the quotation marks, and terminological consistency, adding extra layers of work (ideally done by a project manager). Others love team projects, especially if they can handpick their team members and the collaboration is well-managed (an experience I’ve yet to have). 

On the creative side of the coin, trying to align styles, tastes, and quirks can be as problematic — or downright impossible — as writing a novel as a team might be. 

But, when it comes to drawing on the collective intelligence of our far-flung translator community, even my fantasy translator co-working space would be hard-pressed to match the virtual joining of many (brilliant) minds to pick.   

 

In my early years, I was sitting in my little bedroom in Brooklyn, looking out at the fire escape and working on a translation. An annoying phrase came up — punto di riferimento —  a common expression in business promotion speak. This was the hundredth time it had come up in my short career, and it has no one-size-fits-all solution. It occurred to me that my more experienced colleagues would have faced the problem umpteen times. A query to a listserv group of Italian/English translators produced 25 brilliant suggestions, from “lodestar” to “standard setter” which led to Pesky Words (https://miriamhurley.com/pesky/), now with dozens of Peskies and solutions to draw on to fit the always-all-important context.

 

These days, I turn often to a Facebook group, made up of both IT>EN and EN>IT translators, the native English speakers from many Anglophone countries. Every time the final result is better than my single tired brain could summon on its own. Sometimes I have misunderstood the source text or not realized there’s a typo in it muddying the waters. More often than not, I just want inspiration, and I always find it. As we translators know well, it is a fraught path from understanding intent in the source language to bringing it unscathed into our target language.  

 

Just a few examples in which the group put me on the path to a better solution:

 

A headline in a blog post about the Pope kissing the feet of Sudanese leaders to ask for peace called it “un gesto sconvolgente.”  The group gave me a nice selection of solutions — “extraordinary,” “remarkable,” “unexpected,” “astonishing”  — from which I chose to best fit the article’s content (“astonishing”). 

 

In the subtitles for a short film, a young man fighting with his sister attacks her as an “inconcludente.” The group shepherded me to “loser.” Recently, in a completely different context, it helped me with the same word applied scathingly to Romanian journalists in the 1930s, and we ended up calling them “shallow.”

 

In another short film, a 30-year-old Italian man answers the phone when his mother is calling with “Ciao, amore mio bello.” This led to an interesting discussion about terms of endearment men might use (or not) for their mothers around the English-speaking globe and settling on “my darling mother.” 

 

Meeting and networking in flesh and blood — whether at translator events like conferences or a co-working space  — offers real-world satisfaction that our virtual community can’t match. Yet, I often think of a friend’s grandfather who worked as a Hungarian translator a century ago, translating from several languages, spending his days in the library, hunting through dictionaries and reference books. He almost certainly would not have had the problems I have, like getting distracted by online videos of sloths eating carrots. But, he also would not have had the wealth of inspiration, humor, research skills, and advice from an international fleet of top-flight translators so generously sharing their knowledge. 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Bursting out on Girl in Florence

Posted on June 13, 2019     Leave a Comment

I was delighted to be a guest blogger on one of Florence’s top blogs: Girl in Florence. I wrote about my experience in Florence, especially with meeting new people, and about Speakeasy Multilingual Happy Hours, language exchange events I organize in Florence.

Read my post here:

Bursting out of our social bubbles

 

How would you say that? Frankly, we wouldn’t.

Posted on October 30, 2018     Leave a Comment

Language and culture are ingredients baked into the bread of communication — an inconvenient fact but one that sure keeps translation ever-challenging.

A few examples from totally disparate worlds:

Food

Though the old saw about Eskimos having 500 words for snow is actually just a myth, I can assure you that Italians do have many more than that for pasta (1,000 by the BBC’s estimate).  For an extra twist — not surprising given that food and language in Italy are both all about region — the same pasta shape often has different names in different regions (or even different neighborhoods!). The pasta section on an Italian menu can become a list of unfamiliar pasta shapes in sauces with special names used only in that region. On the upside, paired with machine translation, this contributes to the venerable tradition of unintentional menu translation humor (example: Penne alla contadina = “Pens at the Peasant”). If you’re translating the menu to inform and tantalize patrons, rather than for laughs, you might leave the dish names in Italian and follow them with a description. Or you might use a gloss, such as “short twisted pasta” for “trofie.”

Movies

Film titles are a long-standing translation bugaboo, often drenched in wordplay and cultural references. Consider Pulp Fiction, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Reality Bites, The Crying Game, and The Kids Are Alright. Movie titles pose an extra challenge: the ultimate question the translator must consider is the purpose of the text, and a major purpose of movie titles is to sell tickets. Italian movie executives apparently thought that a quote from an Alexander Pope poem (“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! “) wouldn’t be box office gold and opted for Se mi lasci ti cancello (“If you leave me, I’ll erase you”). I once brainstormed with a group of translators to come up with a plausible English title for an Italian film called Provincia Meccanica (literally “Mechanical Province”; you see why we didn’t think the literal version would cut it), a reference to the Italian translation of Clockwork Orange (Arancia Meccanica), further complicated by “provincia,” which has heaps of connotations (small town, provincial). Coming up with an English title is an example of what has been termed transcreation. We tried to recreate the intent and effect of the original, fit the context, and have it “work.” No mean task, I tell you.

Resumes

I often translate CVs for academics and others looking for work beyond Italy. The standard European CV (example on right) breaks just about every rule of resume-writing in the U.S. (example on left). Some aspects, such as including one’s age and marital status, even violate anti-discrimination laws. We don’t put in pictures (unless you’re an actor or model). We keep it to two pages or less. No yawn-worthy laundry lists of past jobs and duties. In the U.S. resumes are meant to be snappy marketing documents to tell the story of how our past jobs made us perfect for this new job.

 

If a client were applying to U.S. businesses, a “straight” translation would be well-nigh useless. The resumes would never get past the resume-sorting software that almost all U.S. businesses use.

Like transcreation for marketing copy, transforming a typical Italian CV into a successful resume for the U.S. market means taking ingredients — context, content, intent —  and making a new recipe, one that might please the palates of the target audience.

 

Happy International Translation Day

Posted on October 1, 2018     Leave a Comment

September 30th is International Translation Day, celebrated since 1953 on the Feast of St. Jerome, the Bible-translating saint and, hence, the patron saint of translation.

Last year the UN even officially declared it such, recognizing “the role of language professionals in connecting nations and fostering peace, understanding and development.”

Recognition is nice but I think we need more fun traditions to make it a proper holiday. Maybe competitive games like trying to confuse Google Translate by deliberately writing sentences that it gets humorously wrong? Or is that too nerdy?

The Joy of Learning — Derrieres, loafers, and flaneurs

Posted on June 16, 2017     1 Comment

I often have cause to think of the paradox that this Danish study explored in depth:

Though translators complain long and loud about many aspects of our profession, particularly about our effort being underappreciated, we generally rate very high on job satisfaction. I don’t know if the satisfaction expressed in the Danish study applies cross-culturally (the Danes are the second happiest people in the world, for Pete’s sake), but I agree with its conclusion that constant learning is a major source of this satisfaction. In the words of one translator surveyed in the study:

I gain knowledge within areas that I would never otherwise come into touch with, which gives me a very broad reference framework in everyday debates in society. I think it is a wonderful job where every day you have the possibility to learn something new and get wiser.

Or, in the more succinct words of my friend and colleague Catherine, “I get paid to read.”

When we translate, we aim to write in the style and use the terminology fitting the subject area. When starting a new job, we typically do some online research of texts in our language on the subject and then more focused research as questions come up. Those of us who translate into English are particularly fortunate as most topics have a wealth of online writings in English (though the quality and accuracy of the English is unreliable; the double-edged sword of having English as the international lingua franca).

We translators surely confuse Google as it tries to peg our true interests. For instance, I’ve recently researched the following:

1. Rumors about Kim Kardashian’s butt being fake — for a satirical magazine.
2. What exactly you call the metal thingy on men’s luxury loafers — for a fashion resale site (hint: it’s not “metal thingy”).
3. The details of the murder Caravaggio committed — for a hotel blog.
4. The invention of a new device for assisting difficult childbirth — for a news features for an NGO.
5. The difference between “the price of rice in China” and “the price of beans” — for a blog on food-related expressions.
6. Futuristic floating architecture projects to help us cope with climate change.
7. The discipline of visual anthropology  — for a project proposal.
8. The history of French Surrealist flaneurs — for an anthropological article.

Google surely thinks that I’m wealthy, celebrity-obsessed, highly eccentric and have a lot of free time to research seemingly unrelated facts.

In my actual free time — or multi-tasking when doing mindless tasks — I like to listen to the lectures of online classes, MOOCs. Right now, I’m listening to Moralities of Everyday Life, staying on theme with the last class I listened to, Moral Foundations of Politics. So now the breadth of my conversation can span all the way from Kim Kardashian’s derriere — the goal of my research was to choose the best synonym for butt — to Enlightenment political theories and chimpanzee warfare vs. the sex lives of bonobos.

I don’t know if I’d say this all made me wiser or more popular at cocktail parties, but it’s certainly entertaining!

Seek and Ye Might Find—Research tips for translators

Posted on February 9, 2017     Leave a Comment

Information abounds. In translation, as in lay life, the immense volume of it means that the trick is to find accurate information quickly without sinking into the morass of its excess. Back in the day, dictionaries and libraries were a translator’s best friends. Now our best (though often treacherous) friend is Google. To put it and other research tools to best use, first consider the nature of your ignorance.

So, what do you need to know?

What a single word means. This most basic problem is also the least frequent for experienced translators and easiest to solve. Say you come across the Italian word “bradipo” for the first time. Of course, a dictionary would work, but just putting it straight into Google is faster and more effective. You get the English translation (“three-toed sloth”), images, the Wikipedia entry, and lots of other information you can use to choose the best translation for your context. However, beware of homophones, including cross-lingual ones. If you find “scotch” on an Italian back-to-school list, a simple Google search will lead you far astray! The fastest, most effective option is a Google search with the word and a context-defining word, such as “scotch + scuola” (“school” in Italian).

What something looks like. Fashion and industrial design get quite fanciful with color and treatment descriptions. Popular Italian color terms are “cipria” (literally, face powder) and “petrolio” (literally, petroleum). The fastest way to see exactly what a color or treatment looks like is a quick Google Image search with, for instance, “color cipria.” Then, just check if your translation, such as “powder pink,” visually matches up.

Alternate meanings. Italian is full of tricky words with alternate meanings or ones by imaginative extension. A much-mistranslated example is “declinare.” Sansoni gives eleven definitions. None of which reflects this usage (about architectural design):

Tutto è pensato in una visione sistemica e la sostenibilità è declinata in ogni aspetto.

When confused by an unusual usage of a word, I turn first to the monolingual Treccani, which gives lengthy explanations and is especially good for archaic usage. But, in this case, we’d just get lost in a forest of other meanings.

Linguee.com comes to the rescue. Drawing on bilingual online texts to show in-context human translations, it gives many options (“to cover,” “to take the form of,” “to interpret,” “to give a…meaning,” “to translate”). I often opt for “to express,” which is nice and squishy in its usage, like declinare. The sense here is actually borrowing from the 12^th definition in Sansoni [2 (Gramm) to decline.], referring to word declensions, and stretching its meaning.

What we actually say.  The question translators ask much more than what something means in the source language is what we would actually say in the target in a given context. We look for ideas rather than invariably right answers. This was the origin of my Pesky Words.  The meaning of a common word like “artigiano” is clear, but it is less obvious when and where the use of “artisan” versus “craftsman” versus “craftsperson.” Here Google can be as marvelous as it can be misleading. Calques of Romance-language usage can be so numerous that they might look correct. You can narrow the search to “.com” or, perhaps better, “.uk” sites to weed out non-native writing. For example, a Google search of “The company is a point of reference” (in Italian, calling a company a “punto di riferimento” is a favorite pastime) yields three pages of results, but Italian fingerprints are all over them; the companies described are all Italian or Spanish and the surrounding language is awkward. All signs that native English writers are unlikely to say it.

What an expression means. Idiomatic expressions can be a special challenge. If the expression is common enough, say “in bocca al lupo,” Google will immediately tell you all you need to know. Wordreference.com forums are great for scaring up ideas to solve idioms and getting a good grasp of the range of usage, especially for the many phrases (“piove sul bagnato,” literally, “it rains on the soaked”) that have no close cousins in the target language. The forum discussions will give you grist for the mill to come up with your own solution.

Technical terms. Even in officially non-technical translations, tough technical terminology can show up. Kudoz from Proz.com (just use Google by putting your term in quotes and Proz) will give you multiple suggestions and discussions among translators about them. You can look up online glossaries in the field. The “look inside” feature on Amazon and Google Books is great if you find a print technical dictionary or glossary.  Or you can start your glossary search at Glossarissimo.

Historical names, plant/animal species, and place names. Wikipedia’s multilingual sidebar links are lovely starting points for these kinds of questions. What was Alexander the Great called in Italian?  For species names, it always helpfully gives the Latin name to help you through the forest of alternate common names. Ponderosa Pine, anyone? Always double check Wikipedia’s suggestions as the wiki format can usher in inaccuracy.

And the ever-necessary word to the wise: just because it’s written doesn’t mean it’s true. Doubt, double check, and cross check.

Resources:

Glossarissimo

Kudoz from Proz.com

Linguee.com

Sansoni

Treccani

Wikipedia

Wiktionary

Wordreference.com forums

Translating for the Language Mavens

Posted on April 23, 2015     Leave a Comment

For 20 years, my friend Jun and I have disagreed about language. A one-time copyeditor, she rigorously responds to “How are you?” with “I’m well” and not “Good.” I think she’s never met a split infinitive she liked. I, on the other hand, am a follower of Steven Pinker, who says of Jun (or William Safire, same difference):

“The legislators of “correct English,” in fact, are an informal network of copy editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists and pundits.Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to carrying out standards that maximize the language’s clarity, logic, consistency, precision, stability and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column “On Language” for the New York Times Magazine, calls himself a “language maven,” from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! Kibitzers and nudniks is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. The rules conform neither to logic nor to tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all.Indeed, most of the “ignorant errors” these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.”

I like to boldly split infinitives and would love to flout even more such nonsensical rules. But, when translating, the specter of Jun gives me pause. We always write for imagined readers. I want my translations to be understood and sound good to native and non-native English readers. If I break a beloved rule of the language mavens, I know they will take out their red pens. For instance, I would love to use the “singular they” to get around the awkwardness of “he or she” and the archaicness of “he.” But just as my fingers are about to type “they,” I hold back, if only not to pain Jun.

Customer always right?

Posted on September 22, 2014     Leave a Comment

English is a sensitive issue for many Italians. Until recently, it was infamously poorly taught in schools. Knowing English well is associated with career success, travel and worldliness. Many Italians I know who have a solid intermediate level of English will claim to know none. However, the paradoxical flip side of the coin of insecurity can be overconfidence. Clients asking for my services will often say they just don’t have the time to do it themselves. All over Italy are the disastrous results of people confident they needn’t pay a translator.

Because English skill is an ego-laden point here — correcting someone’s English can seem tantamount to calling them a rube — it takes tact to deal with non-native revisers. Italians with high-level English (and always correspondingly aware of their limitations) can be great revisers; their questions often lead me to better solutions. But I find it difficult to avoid getting tetchy with over-confident revisers. Some signs of overconfidence:

1) Translating slogans, section titles, etc. themselves. Recently, I just barely saved a client from printing up their staff T-shirts with a major grammar mistake in the English.

2) Sending “corrections” (“coocked ham”) to the English directly to the graphic designer and merely CCing the translator.

3) Rejecting the translator’s suggestions in favor of what “sounds right to them.”

4) Thinking it’s easy and should be paid accordingly.

I like to be helpful to my clients, and I understand how it can be hard — particularly for authors — to relinquish control. But I’d ask a little more faith, a little more humility, and perhaps a little independent Googling before querying common English phrases.