Despite what some people think and claim, it’s not just a matter of reading in one language and writing in another: especially when dealing with legal or technical documents, even a short text can require a substantial amount of research. Of course, over time it becomes easier, as one learns where to look for reliable information, and simply stockpiles commonly used turns of phrases to look up in a pinch.

I have worked on projects big enough, sometimes for huge companies whose products you most likely use or have used—I cannot be any more specific due to non-disclosure agreements I have signed—to realize, first-hand, that translation is way more than that. Each individual project, no matter how big or small, has its own peculiarities. Translating a mobile app for children requires a different approach compared to the technical manual of a safety valve testing rig, for instance, and a certificate of pending charges has very little in common with the product descriptions of an online shop specialized in DJ equipment.

While mistakes can happen, translation is one field in which striving for perfectionism is a very basic requirement. It is true that once the project is delivered, never hearing again from the client is a good sign (it means everything went fine and no revision is required!), but sloppiness is never a good way to start. This is especially true for certified translations, a field I recently started working on.

Knowing that a translation is going to be certified by the agency means that, as a translator, I represent the agency; and the agency is solemnly claiming, to the full extent of the Law, that the translation faithfully matches the original text. Nothing is allowed to go wrong. And this opens up a whole new can of worms for each project: should I use the American date format, with the month before the day, or the European date format, with the day before the month? Should I use the British or the American spelling, if I’m translating into English? What is the best way to rephrase this without drifting too much from the original, while at the same time being fully clear for the reader? And what if something simply does not exist in the countries where the destination language is spoken?

It can be daunting. And it’s a good idea never to feel too confident, for overconfidence is the root cause of catastrophe (“look ma, no hands! look ma, no teeth!”). I was lucky to have wonderful supervisors and coordinators for all the agencies I work with: they guided me as I took my first few steps and encouraged me, putting up with my incredible level of early paranoia. Sometimes I still worry when I pick up a job: the customer may not be clear in her requests, or something may be unreadable if it’s a scan, or I may just have no idea how to translate a specific passage until I research it in detail.

But I always made it work, and it’s very rewarding on many levels. Sometimes I stop and think about what I do, and what it means to me—why I love it so much. Translation is the ultimate tool for communication. When you speak one language, your message has a limited pool of potential recipients: those who understand that language. By translating it into other languages, the pool grows considerably, and your message gets one step closer to being universally understood.

As a translator, I am enabling people to achieve that goal, whatever their message may be. It’s often commercial in nature: press releases, apps, websites. Sometimes, however, it’s not: I have translated texts for charities, for projects that involved or were targeted at kids. I distinctly remember one Sunday morning, when I almost accidentally picked up one such job; I couldn’t stop myself, and left a comment to the customer simply thanking them for what they were doing, and for allowing me to be a small part of it.

And then of course, there’s the other kind of material: the certified documents that end up on the desks of notaries, lawyers, ambassadors. Each one of these, no matter how small or short, make me feel honored, and that’s for a simple reason: because they all tell a story. Sometimes the customer shares a few basic details: “I need this to apply for citizenship”, or “this is for my son’s passport”. Other times I can infer it: a university transcript is the prime sign that the student is packing to work abroad, for instance.

Yet many times, there’s not enough context to tell what it is for, and my imagination runs wild. I wonder why this person with a French last name is requiring his father’s birth certificate to be translated, or what the property mentioned as being for sale looks like, or whether there is any update on the prognosis described in this medical report. I wonder, and imagine, and dream. Like when I was thrown all the way to a hundred and thirty years ago, trying to read the gorgeous but amazingly cryptic cursive of a birth certificate from the 1890s. That was barely thirty years after Italy was united into a single country. That was before the first modern plane flew. That was before the world knew what the Great War was. That was when school was something for the rich, and the common folk couldn’t even sign a certificate because they simply couldn’t read or write. I have no idea why this stuff needed to be translated, or what the customer’s ultimate goal was; I cannot come up with any reason beyond genealogy research.

But at the end of the day, as curious as I am, I do not even want to know. I’m content with knowing that someone’s communication need was fulfilled, and I was the one who enabled them to do so. That’s why I do this.

This is especially true for languages — such as English — that allow long sequences of words to be joined together without prepositions, and that use the same word both as a noun and as a verb.

Take for instance this news story from New Zealand. The headline is “Police chase driver in hospital.” There are two ways to parse it:

1. Policemen have chased a driver within a hospital’s premises
2. A driver who was chased by the police was hospitalized

(Note that in Australian/NZ English, just like in British English, collective nouns are usually conjugated with verbs in the third plural person, unlike in American English.)

Such ambiguous phrases don’t even require verbs. The noun phrase “The beautiful girls’ school” could be interpreted as:

1. The beautiful school that is for girls only
2. The school that is only for beautiful girls

There is no solution for this issue, except for rewriting such phrases in a more explcit way. For purely educational purposes, using parentheses  may come in handy to identify the building blocks: “(Police chase) (driver)” vs. “(Police) (chase driver).”

Or we could all switch to Lojban…

Anybody who studied a foreign language, even without reaching fluency, has most likely had an experience with the linguistic relativity principle. The farther the language in question is different from the native language, the more the phenomenon is obvious.

Since I am currently writing in English, I will refer to English as the native language (L1), and for this to be a real-world example, let’s use Spanish as the target language (L2). They are quite different languages indeed: Modern English belongs to the greater West Germanic group, while Spanish is obviously a Romance language. Even though most Westerners are inevitably familiar with both and may able to understand simple phrases even without formal training (in part because there has been some contamination over the centuries), they are very different.

English nouns have no gender, and even though some of them do carry one (mother, father, brother, sister, etc.), they are still grammatically neuter. In Spanish, and indeed in all languages derived from Latin, all nouns carry a gender: the moon is feminine (la luna), the sun is masculine (el sol); interestingly enough, Spanish has no neuter gender! This is a source of frustration for native speakers of genderless languages: apart from the obvious nouns — la madre, el padre — a foreigner will have to send the gender of common nouns to memory, because there is simply no rule. Why is the hand feminine (la mano), but the foot masculine (el pie)? In many cases Latin can come to the rescue, but it’s probably wiser to just accept it as a challenge, and comply peacefully.

On the other hand, Spanish native speakers can find the lack of gender in English just as confusing. In Spanish you can differentiate between “mi amigo” and “mi amiga,” but in English you have no such luxury. Of course, you can say “my male friend” and “my female friend,” or formulate your sentence in such a way that the gender of the friend becomes obvious, but I can guarantee that a speaker of a Romance language — like me, as a matter of fact — will never get used to being left in the dark upon hearing phrases such as “I met a friend.”

This is a clear effect of linguistic relativity: the peculiarities of our native language are taken for granted, and do shape the way we interact with the world. We expect certain parameters to be taken care of, and when we switch to a language with a different rule set, we end up confused and resigned.

Another practical example is the usage of verbs: Italian has two “main” past tenses, called passato prossimo and passato remoto, ie. near past and far past. They are roughly equivalent in construction to past perfect and simple past. However, the former is used for events in the recent past, and the latter for events in the distant past; nobody would use passato remoto for something that happened just yesterday, while in English it’s perfectly legitimate (and effectively advised) to use simple past in such a case.

In other situations, instead, the target language may offer more choices than we are used to, and we end up not knowing which one to use: most English speakers have a hard time choosing between ser and estar in Spanish, for instance. In Esperanto, the way participles are formed yields a table of nine combinations for compound verbs: three tenses for the auxiliary verbs (past, present and future), and three tenses for the participles. It is not difficult to grasp the concept when unusual combinations are used, such as a past auxiliary and a future participle, but it’s virtually impossible to translate it to any other language.

This leads us to an interesting question: if our native language shapes the way we deal with the world to the point that we get confused when other languages have no direct equivalent forms for what we want to say (or ours doesn’t match what we’re being told in the foreign language), does it also work backwards? In other words: can forcing the usage of a specifically-tailored language effectively change the way people speak?

Such a theory has been exploited by George Orwell in its famous dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which the Party has gradually enforced the usage of a new, artificially modified language. The new language — aptly named Newspeak — is simplified: by getting rid synonyms and antonyms, people’s thoughts would also be simplified, and that is the ultimate goal of any totalitarian regime. To do so, prefixes and postfixes are used: bad becomes ungood, great becomes plusgood, excellent becomes doubleplusgood. This is not unlike Esperanto, although the simplification of Zamenhof language was aimed at helping its diffusion rather than limiting the thinking abilities of its speakers. [One might argue whether malsanulejo is really any simpler than *hospitalo: mal- (not), -san- (health), -ul- (person), -ej- (place), -o (noun).]

The Party’s reasoning is indeed very simple: by reducing the ways people can express thoughts, at some point they will be unable to even conceive them. In a world where people’s minds were constantly proved to be fallible, for instance by secretly rewriting newspapers, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the folk will ultimately comply.

Whether Newspeak would work in the real world, especially in the highly globalized, twenty-first-century world that almost speaks in a single planetary pidgin, is not clear. However, there was at least one attempt, and it was made before Orwell wrote his best-selling novel.

At the end of the 1930s, the fascist regime in Italy promoted the Italic lineage, or “stirpe italica.” Everything Italian, or actually Italic (the distinction being that the latter refers to the ancient great times or Rome, from whose culture Fascism borrowed many symbols), was to be praised and protected. Mussolini was what we would today call a charismatic leader, someone who knew how to handle public relations: he knew how to speak to crowds and make them agree to anything — the declaration of war in 1940 is a testament to this —, also by describing a world that differed from reality. Imported products had to be replaced with locally-made surrogates, and even art was controlled and subjected to heavy censorship: this was the beginning of the infamous tradition of dubbing movies (which was done mostly to replace “inconvenient” parts) that still persists today, but language in general was greatly regulated.

Starting in 1938, the Italianization of foreign words became very aggressive. Not only common foreign nouns were translated (football became giuoco del calcio or calcio; basketball became pallacanestro; sandwich became tramezzino; etc.), but even cities were renamed to hide their foreign origins, with the clear goal of making them “more Italian.” This happened especially in the north-east of the country, an area of strong Slavic presence: Ahrntal became Valle Aurina, Pivka became San Pietro del Carso and so on. Even many last names were replaced with Italian translations or assonances: Vodopivec became Bevilacqua, Krizman became Crismani.

Did this make people more Italian? It’s hard to say, as such an experiment should have to last several decades to yield any measurable effects, yet that would be an unacceptable imposition upon a population. However, some of these words are still in modern use, and movies, as I said, are still dubbed.

What is certain is that the elements we have seem to show that forcing people to speak in a certain way may have censorship as a side effect. Thankfully, in today’s world the Internet tends to restore the languages’ natural evolution path, as it helps bypassing centralized regulation, and also fuels the linguistic melting pot more than centuries of human migrations ever could. But what if a community has no access to modern technology? Can closed groups give a deeper insight about the relationship between language and thought? They may, but that is something I will talk about in a future post.