But It’s Not Natural!
/Understanding Discourse and Translation Principles
a Guest Post by Dr. Mary Morgan
There is a myth that a Mother Tongue (MT) speaker of a language is automatically a competent translator into their language. Of course, there are good storytellers in every language. There are people with the gift of using words well whether orally or in written form. These are the people we want as authors in their own languages.
However, a person doing translation is in some degree bilingual or she would not be able to go from one language to another. Or she has someone who is bilingual asking her how to say something in her language from another language. People who speak their MT but have never written it have probably been educated from elementary school through university education in an official language which is very different linguistically from their MT. In order to translate effectively and naturally, they need to understand some basic principles about how narratives work in their own languages. Also the differences between oral and written discourses need to be understood. Coherence (how a text makes connections in order to make sense) needs to be developed for the written form of the language.
There are other challenges in translating from one language to another. For example, idioms, such as “raining cats and dogs” to say it’s raining hard, are often difficult to translate. How do you translate words whose meaning does not have a cultural equivalent between the languages being translated? How do you handle implicatures (things that are implied in an discourse, including culture-based behaviors) and metaphors?
One Cameroonian student and literacy worker found that the reason his translations into his MT were not natural was because his formal training was in English and French. Both have the obligatory use of explicit pronouns in texts. His MT uses the explicit pronoun to introduce a topic or character and then uses a pronoun marker on the verbs until there is another change of topic of character. He was always putting in the explicit pronoun with each verb phrase. The text was understood, but not natural. This man realized his mistake in a discourse class as he charted a folk tale into paragraphs and realized how pronouns and pronoun markers were actually used.
In the Solomon Islands, radio announcers who were fluent in Solomon Island Pijin found that they were inserting English words into their Pijin reports on health and agriculture issues. They just used the words they had learned in class and in texts on the subjects. In a discourse workshop, they discovered that they didn’t actually know the meanings of the words. They had just memorized them to pass tests. As they learned the meanings of key words in health and agriculture, they often found that there were words and expressions in Pijin that expressed the meanings clearly. There had been a disconnect from using words without understanding their meaning.
As an exercise in translation, a group of literacy workers and students whose MT was not English wrote a narrative in their MT and translated it back into English. They found that there were concepts in the MT that were not found in one-word or -phrase translations into English. For example they had a word for sitting together after a meal to aid digestion and to enjoy the fellowship. Both German and Dutch have such a word, but English does not. As they tried to translate this word into English, they realized that the concept was related to, but the opposite of, the English saying “eat and run” A paraphrase was needed.
Another example for the difficulty of translating the words or phrases of concepts that occur in one culture and not in another is the concept of ‘privacy’. In the Tzeltal culture in Chiapas, Mexico, it is considered stupid to do anything alone. Protection and security come with always having someone with you. People from an individualistic culture assume that everyone knows what privacy is. How would you translate that concept into a language without that concept?
What can we do to help ourselves, and more importantly help those we are training, to work in their own language to produce natural and understandable texts? A basic understanding of the principles of translation and discourse provide needed insight. I recommend taking an introductory course in either of these disciplines. Introductory books or manuals that are very helpful are also available.
Analyzing Discourse:, an Introduction to Basic Concepts by Dooley and Levinsohn is excellent. It is in English and Spanish. For an introduction to translation principles, a much earlier version of In Other Words by Mona Baker was used in the UK training program for SIL. There is a new 2018 version to the same text but it is very expensive. If anyone has access to the older version (check the nearest SIL technical library), it has the basic concepts and exercises for practicing translation. It is based on grammar and discourse concepts and reinforces linguistic understanding of languages.
This post first appeared in ISSUE 28 of “Literati,” SIL International’s Bimonthly Electronic Newsletter. Reposted here with the author’s permission. Dr. Morgan has previously written for us here with the guest post, Ten Essential Elements of an Effective Orthography Workshop.
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