Tuesday, December 19, 2006
An Interesting Spanish Translation Discussion
Began on our Martinez Watch blog, but I am moving it here because of its more general applicability to the official English issue.
The short version of the debate is that Benjamin Zimmer took exception to a link to the Language Log website from StopMartinez.com web site. He had his say. I had mine. Now he has had another go and, to his credit, conceded one of my major points.
His entire post, which is primarily one of complaining that my use of the Language Log's original translation debate link was a bit of a reach in the Martinez context (fair enough -- there are better examples of the translation problems caused by multilingual government) and opposition to the official English cause (not quite so fair), is well worth reading. I am adding a link to it at StopMartinez.com, in addition to the link under dispute.
The relevant excerpt (broken up into shorter paragraphs for your reading ease) follows:
[Update: I will concede one point to Mr. Boulet. It's true that any cross-linguistic rendering can be critiqued for accuracy, especially among the discerning readers of Language Log. Here is Matthew Stuckwisch's take on the translation of Martinez's speech that appeared in the Congressional Record:
Whilst Martínez says "esta gran nación" (this great N/nation), the Congressional record states "our Nation". Perhaps to add parallelism in the English the simple term "niños" (children) was changed to "schoolchildren". The remaining structure of the next sentence has been rather distorted, substantially changing the meaning IMO. He then says "Debemos reconocer" (We must recognise), an indicative statement, whereas the translation uses the imperative "Let us acknowledge". Oddly "sobre todo" (above all) was changed to "especially", even though above all is a common expression with the same meaning in English. The English translation quite curiously added the adjective "petty" (non-existent in the Spanish) to "politicking". ...
[H]ere is Alexander Jabbari's assessment of the speeches and their transcriptions:
After reading your recent Language Log post, I thought you might be interested to hear that the transcriptions of both Jim Inhofe's and Mel Martinez's Spanish speeches are riddled with orthographical mistakes, and furthermore that Inhofe's use of Spanish in his Nov. 12 speech is not very good and sounds like it was translated directly from English by someone who is not a native speaker of Spanish, whereas Martinez's Spanish is perfect.
I'm sure that's not surprising, as Martinez speaks Spanish as a first language and Inhofe evidently doesn't, but what was mostly surprising to me was the transcription.
The transcription of Inhofe's speech contains spelling errors ("descrácia" instead of desgracia), misuse of diacritics ("senádo" instead of "senado," along with many other words containing diacritics where they don't belong), and an error in capitalization ("Hispános" instead of hispanos), not to mention the translation glosses "hispanos" as "Hispanic Americans," though the term refers to Hispanics of any country.
Although Martinez's Spanish is impeccable, the transcription of his Spanish is not. It also contains a few capitalization errors (such as "estudiantes de Derecho" instead of estudiantes de derecho) and contains no diacritics whatsoever (except "ñ"), though many words in his speech should be written with diacritics (such as nación, which is written as "nacion" in the transcription).
It is my understanding that a Senator who uses a language other than English on the Senate floor provides the English translation. I will look into the transcription issue.
There was another fascinating point in the post: "[T]here's an interesting usage note for the Spanish hyphen. Whilst in English it is generally known as a joiner, in Spanish it's generally consider a divider."
Signals of this sort to readers of a given text are another aspect of translation that most nonspecialists never consider.
Thank you, Language Log.
|posted by Jim on 10:48 PM|
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