Matthew B. McDonald

I take it you think that the translator is someone who is really good at two or more languages. In this supposition, you are not wrong. But there’s more to it than that. If the only requirements to be a translator were to know two languages at an advanced level, I believe we’d have a lot more translators out there. But it’s a fact that translation requires more skills than the expert knowledge of two or more languages. There are several reasons for this, all of which I will explain in more detail in the posterior paragraphs.

The first, and perhaps most important reason, is that knowing two languages is a good starting point, but it does not equate with knowing how to transition between these two languages. In other words, it means that one may have a strong grasp of the two languages, but this same person may lack the ability to translate between the languages. This implies that there is a set of skills beyond the mere knowledge of two languages that we’ll define as translation skills. These skills involve being to translate the meaning of sentences in one language to another language. These skills are really what is in demand when one hires a translator. It is not just bilingualism that one is after when hiring a translator. As a buyer of translations, you want to make sure not only that you are buying a quality translation, but also that the person you are hiring knows how to accurately and adequately convey the message of one language’s text into another completely distinct language.

That is to say that there is evidence for the supposition that one needs to be able to convert meanings from one language to another if she wants to be a translator. This is distinct from bilingualism. Bilingualism posits only that one is fluent and conversant in two languages. It does not imply that one knows how to convert the message of one language in another. Of course, many bilingual people are also translators, but being bilingual does not entail being a translator as well. Being a translator entails being bilingual, however, as a consequence of our discussion.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term tertium comparationis as “the factor which links or is the common ground between two elements in comparison.” Why is this important to our discussion? Because the language being translated and the language being translated into are perfect examples of these elements referenced in the Oxford definition. In other words, there is a third element in translation. One might think that translation is just converting the message of one language into another, which entails that there are only two elements involved. But I’d ask you to consider what the third element of translation could be. In my opinion, it is the actual conversion process which is the third element of translation that many people miss when they are thinking about translation. That is because languages do not easily translate into other languages completely. Languages are messy, and this means translating them into other languages requires a special set of skills to create this third element of translation, be it in one’s mind, or on paper, but a translator must have this capacity to engage in the conversion of a message in one language to another distinct language.

Thus, this substratum (what underlies translation) is the fact that there are two languages involved, however, there is a conversion process that must occur as well for translation to meaningfully take place.

So, in sum, there is a third process that is meaningful to translation, which is the comparison process of one language to another. All this means for practical purposes is that a translator should be trained in this comparison process. Why? Because that is what distinguishes translation from being bilingual.

If there were no comparison process, how would we assure as translators that a piece of text was roughly or close to being equivalent to another piece of text in another language? The answer is that without such a process, we would not be able to assure ourselves that what we were translating is roughly or close to being equivalent to the other piece of foreign text. This is a huge advance. I hope people realize how far translation has come over the years. Because this wouldn’t have been possible many years ago.

I think, before translation became mainstream, or before it was even used as a technique, people may have relied on certain interpreters, but there probably was no way of empirically verifying that what the interpreter or translator was saying or writing was actually correct. Today, we know enough about languages that this is no longer the case. We do know how to spot translation mistakes, and we can point them out when they occur. Curious, perhaps, is the notion that a non-translator can spot these mistakes, alike to the translator as well (usually).

There is still a lot of room for error and compensation between languages, and there is still a lot to work out regarding theories of translation, and there is still a large amount of transfer that happens between languages that is not straightforward at all. I don’t foresee that this will change in the near future, either. But the fact that translators are willing to work on these perhaps thorny issues means that the industry and the field are progressing, in my view.