The scope for minimal translation

Users seldom specify their requirements and the translator has to decide on the basis of circumstantial evidence what quality level is expected. She usually takes the following into account.

- How much time is available for the translation?

- Is the translation a temporary or a permanent one (is it going to be published)?

- How dependent the readership is going to be on the translation - is it likely to be read at all?

-What is the fuction of the translation: is it mainly informative or has it also got an important aesthetic function?

- Is a reader officially provided?

- Does the text make sense? Is it translatable at all?

- How much are they are going to pay?

4.1 Time

Undoubtedly, minimal translation is most often required when time is short, and fast translation is preferable to good translation or no translation at all. The whole business of simultaneous interpreting comes under this heading, but there are also many written translations that have to be done in no time at all. Limited time may make anything but a minimal translation impossible, and the fact that the translation was commissioned at such short notice may indicate to the experienced translator that the importance of the translation is not rated very high by the user. It might have been just an afterthought: “Ohyes, itwould be best to have atranslation, too.”

Recently I had to translate the programme booklet for an agricultural exhibition in one day’s time. It was on a Sunday, the library was closed, so I had no access to

Section 1. Users’ Expectations

reference books. I decided that the quality I could manage under such conditions was probably all right: if the organisers had really set great store by high-quality transla­

tion, they would have commissioned it earlier.

4.2 Permanency

Permanent translations must be done more carefully than temporary translations.

If you know your translation will be printed, you are well advised to take more care, because it may be read not only by people who are interested in the subject, but also by other translators and language teachers. From the point of view of permanence, tourist brochures and leaflets are a transitional category, because they are printed but have a short life. They are great stuff if you want to criticise, or carry out error analy­

sis to find out about the contrasts between the two language systems, but I wonder if we really need better translations. Isn’t some foreignness of the language regarded as part of an exotic experience?

4.3 Dependence on translation

The readership (audience) is not always fully dependent on the translation. Take a reception where someone offers a toast. The main function of this is to signal that you can start eating or drinking as the case may be and you are being welcome. Do you lose anything if you do not get the full meaning of the phatic communication that is going on? Thus, you are not very heavily dependent on the translation. If you have a vague idea of what the speaker says it might be quite satisfactory. Of course, if the occasion is very formal, requirements and expectations may be higher. Again, if the speaker offers jokes you would like to laugh at them like everybody else, but with the promise of food and/or drink you can do without that and this is really not a very dangerous situation for an interpreter. The same may happen with written transla­

tions.

Another aspect of the situation is how many of those present speak the SL. If the majority do, the few non-speakers will not complain. The worst audience of course are language teachers (many of them failed interpreters), who always know better, at least post festam.

4.4 Text function

A minimal translation will preserve the most important function of a text and may neglect all other functions. The function of an operation manual is to give instruc­

tions, so a minimal translation may disregard the aesthetic function and use an infe­

rior style. Irrelevant information can in principle be omitted, so even the informative function may be reduced (minimalized), but operation manuals usually contain vast numbers of technical terms and nomenclature, so there is very little information that can be safely regarded as unnecessary. Thus the possibility of minimal translation, from the informative (referential) point of view is minimal, while from the stylistic point of view maximal.

In spite of this we find that technical texts, often minimal-translated, are not at all that bad from the stylistic point of view. This is because technical style itself is often

Pál Heltai

a minimal, impoverished style in many languages, which comes naturally to an expe­

rienced translator, especially if s/he is an expert in the field. With such a translator, a minimal translation might not look very different from his best translation. (Please recall Newmark’s comment referred to above.) With a novice translator, however, a minimal translation might sound rather odd, even if the information is reliably trans­

mitted. In the vast grey area of social sciences (does “social” collocate with “science”?) there is scope for being selective about what information to transfer from the SL text into the TL text and what information to leave behind. The only trouble is that some­

times the translator does not find any information that has to be preserved at all costs.

And it is not only social science where the function of seemingly informative texts is not really referential. The function of flight information on board is not really to tell you at what altitude you are cruising and what the temperature is outside but to signal that your pilot has not catapulted yet, so you are relatively safe. You will know that from his pitch and timbre, and translation into three languages is mainly ritual.

A minimal translation, read out with a foreign accent and transmitted in the form of mechanical noise will suit most passengers.

If the function of the text is predominantly aesthetic, it is this function that has to be rendered. Minimal translation here could only mean loss or distortion of literal meaning, and on this basis most translations of poetry would be classed as minimal.

However, while preserving information content in technical translation is not incom­

patible with stylistic adequacy, in literary translation simultaneous preservation of the aesthetic and the referential function may be impossible, so use of the term minimal translation is less applicable here. Aesthetic value cannot be minimised: there would be no market for such translations - many people do not read even good poems, let alone poems with a reduced aesthetic value translated from another language. An informationally maximally precise rough translation may be used in a two-stage trans­

lation process from exotic languages, where the aesthetic function is added in the second stage by a poet who does not know the SL. Such rough translations are not minimal translations: they are not published.

4.5 Is a reader provided?

If a translation is important, then a reader is usually provided. This is not a very lucrative proposition for a translator, because a reduction in responsibility will involve a reduction in pay, and the translator’s weaknesses may be exposed, too. Anyway, a translator may at least compute the importance of the translation job at hand and act accordingly. So in translating the entries for plough for the publishers of Encyclopae­

dia Britannica Hungarica, I tried to give my best, to follow up every problem, and not just out of professional pride: I was given an eleven-page summary of the pub­

lishers’ requirements, and I knew that there would be a reader who had a say in my fixing the rate. So I knew what was expected.

Of course, users often do not know their own requirements and do not provide a reader where one would be needed. It is to some extent the translator’s responsibility to guess users’ needs and, if necessary, to find access to a reader of his own. But in general the absence of a reader can be interpreted as permission to use minimal trans­

lation techniques.

Section 1. Users’ Expectations

4.6 Translatability

Does the SL text make sense? Is it translatable? Can it motivate the translator?

I find that certain text types cannot be translated adequately (cf. Heltai 1995). So why bother? Translating a chapter from a book for would-be managers on confident decision making I found that there was simply no corresponding Hungarian style.

Whatever I wrote, the whole way of thinking, the whole culture, the whole situation remained alien. So I stopped worrying about the style and trudged along using the techniques of minimal translation.

I have the same experience from watching Dallas on Hungarian television (dubbed).

The Hungarian translation always sounds unnatural to me, but then I always remem­

ber that I could not provide a better translation, either, even if I had unlimited time.

Moreover, the content does not justify anything but a minimal translation. The same applies to most bureaucratic jargon. I pity the poor devils at Brussels whose staple food is translating EU documents. Give me a text on the reversible plough any time.

A recent experience of mine was with a text on social work, written again in that informal and simplistic style I had met in the confident decision maker. Well, I could not bring myself to invest the same energy as into my translation of the reversible plough. While working with this text I made a TAP. Tirkkonen-Condit (1996) says that TAPs are full of evaluations, and mine was. I said all the time: this will do, let’s go on. I didn’t say “Now this isfine.” I also cursed a lot. “ This damneddeverbal noun again.

Who is doing whattowhom?”