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After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics at Rice University, Ben Teague worked as a science teacher, radio announcer and secretary (a physicist’s secretary, he stresses) before coming to translation more than 25 years ago. His résumé includes several years as an officer of the American Translators Association in different capacities, including as its President. A Tennessee native with powerful Texas ties, he now freelances in Athens, Georgia, where his wife Fran teaches at the university. He spends an unhealthy amount of time building sets at a community theater and is, at the time of writing, profoundly involved in a production of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Ben Teague can be reached at
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by Ben Teague | |||
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The good news about translating physics and math is that it’s far easier than translating newspapers, civil engineering, or shipping documents.
The bad news is that most people find it next to impossible. If you compare “physics German” to “German,” you see right away that physicists speak a tiny subset of their language. You can read the stuff for decades without seeing a dozen words of baby talk, street slang, inventive metaphors, kinship terms or value words like “splendid” and “sorry.” Entire tenses may be missing. What’s more, a big hunk of world physics vocabulary is either 20th-century Latin or unashamed straight English. The sublanguage of the physical sciences, let me call it Physpeak, also shows an odd correspondence from language to language: French, English, Russian and Czech physicists use equally small subsets of their tongues. People who write these sublanguages are concerned with precise usage, which is a little different from precision. English-speaking physicists hate it when you confuse resistance and resistivity or when you say electricity is billed by the kilowatt. Physicists were the Ur-geeks who booed George Lucas after hearing a Star Wars character describe the speed of his spaceship in parsecs. Mathematicians never say “sequence” when they mean “series” or “order,” nor do they ever ever get “order” and “ordering” mixed. With a few exceptions, you can look up a definition in your grandmother’s electricity and magnetism textbook and find the same term used today with the same meaning. Now add together a small vocabulary, a stress on precise usage and a marked conservatism, and you probably think “Who says there is no royal road to learning?” A comprehensive dictionary should get you through any amount of physics. But a lot of good translators fail when they try such texts. I can list a few reasons why Physpeak turns out to be a hard language: implausibility, jocularity, high level of abstraction, suppression of background in publications, elliptical forms of development, difficulty of finding definitions, and previous translations. (I suspect that none of these is as important as physics terror, and I will come back to this problem further on.) Many people constitutionally do not believe that numbers like 10 to the minus 23rd or 81.577 plus or minus 0.021 really mean anything. What’s more, any reader of Science News has learned that teleportation used to be impossible but now has been demonstrated in the lab, and that there are hobbyists out there calculating the zillion-and-eighth digit of pi. What can you believe and what must you disbelieve? It is not uncommon to say the hell with it and deny credence to the whole structure. But such a decision changes the science and technology translator to a science-fiction translator, and everybody knows it is nearly impossible to translate science fiction. Physicists (more than mathematicians, less than molecular geneticists) have a tradition of making in-jokes. Not funny jokes by and large, but they do add to the implausibility of some Physpeak texts. Consider for example the Russian word barn, which appears to be a unit of area used by nuclear physicists. You look it up and learn that it means “barn” in English. It’s an American joke from the 1940s, derived from the idiom “hit the broad side of a barn.” A barn is 10 to the minus 28th square meter, absurdly smaller than a, um, barn. See, not funny but also not obvious, and thus not credible either. (I confess to thinking this one is funny, but this wonky sense of humor has gotten me in trouble more than once.) The barn is an instance of physicists speaking in everyday words about bizarre, unexpected and unbelievable things. On a different scale, certain phenomena in the upper atmosphere during thunderstorms have received the name “sprites.” Names like barn and sprite give little hint about concrete objects and processes; they contribute to both the implausibility of Physpeak and its usefulness in concisely pointing to complicated and abstract ideas. Indeed, papers in some areas of physics make little use of words that are hard in themselves; readers have to prepare themselves by learning special meanings for terms like state, collision, hop, path, hue, charm, observer, space and machine. (These very words—in contrast to expressions like nutation, mechanics, Lagrangian and anomaly—generally take “native” forms in the several Physpeaking communities. While nutation becomes nutatsiya in Russian and anomaly is Anomalie in German, state is sostoyanie/Zustand and observer turns into nablyudatel’/Beobachter.) Translators would like it if every physics paper developed its concepts from the egg, but physicists would not. An article on electron levels in metal lattices might, but won’t, refer the reader to a textbook chapter on valence, a standard work on spectroscopy, and the author’s previous work on crystals. Every article would, but doesn’t, incorporate a chain of references going back to some easy basic reading. The lack of such background means the translator has to fill in a lot, and not always in an obvious way. Do you begin your search with “level,” “metal” or what? How do you tell the difference between basic texts, advanced research, and (crucially) results that have been proved wrong? There is a legend about the math professor who fills up three blackboards with derivations and announces, “And the desired result follows trivially.” He looks hard at the theorem, tells the students to wait, fetches an armful of books from his office, and spends the next 45 minutes flipping through them and making notes. Finally he slams shut the last book and proclaims, “Yes, it’s trivial. Class dismissed.” Surely translators hate to see words like trivial and obvious, but it is no less baffling when a Russian writer claims support from an English source but only after changing all the symbols, recasting the integrals as sums and quietly taking logarithms of all the terms. Arguments with the middle steps left out make rough going for the translator, who must work doubly hard to avoid turning them into nonsense—and then may not be able to check. Related to the ellipsis problem is the very common practice of defining terms only when the writer differs with someone else’s definitions. In a lot of Physpeak the best you can hope for is a parenthesis like “in the Hamiltonian formalism,” which points to a framework of definitions and principles that you can look up. More often the writer feels no need to say what common expressions mean, so that the translator must find out whether “path” in this text relates to the motion of an electron in a spark, the change of phase-space coordinates during a process, or the distance that a bombarding ion travels into a solid. A final source of difficulty in Physpeak translation lies in translations already done in the same field. But published or “approved” translations should help, not hurt, you say. I reply that, unless done by an expert colleague, they may contain errors, inconsistencies and “off” choices. Probably the most durable of these near-translations came into English late in the 19th century when the German heading Experimentelles was first rendered as “Experimental.” This is still one of the canonical section titles for lab chemistry papers (along with the grammatically more regular “Introduction,” “Theory,” “Results” and “Discussion”). * * * * No one can deny that Physpeak is a hard language. Can non-scientists translate it all the same? A delicate question. When the American Institute of Physics created a vast program to make Soviet journals available in English, it limited the corps of translators to working scientists. The quality of the results proved the wisdom of the decision. Other publishers did less well, and library shelves are (or used to be) packed with dubious cover-to-cover journals that may have served an “awareness” function but could not have reliably conveyed much about physics.
(1) Formal study. As the holder of an undergraduate degree in physics, I think there is no substitute for a lot of university course work. Typically (in a physics curriculum) you will take lecture and lab courses in mechanics, electricity and magnetism, modern physics (relativity, atomic and nuclear physics, quantum theory), mathematical physics, thermodynamics, plenty of calculus including differential equations, and more math and sciences. You may have the opportunity to assist in an experimental lab. You will learn to do a lot of fancy stuff with computers and lasers.
But some readers of this article don’t have the option of going (back) to school to study physics or chemistry or math. There is a fair second choice: (2) Informal study. A motivated student can learn enough of nearly any subject to qualify as a skilled translator. Physical sciences, as not just a body of knowledge but a discipline of thought, may be harder than some other subjects but not beyond a dedicated student. I suggest, however, that a careful and thorough plan is essential; simply reading magazines and journals can never be enough.
(3) Spot study. Just as a technical translator may run into regulatory texts and contracts—and has no option but to handle them—anybody in the business can expect to see material on physics, chemistry, engineering. Catastrophe? Not every time. Given a little science background, some access to tools and just a bit of nerve, most any translator can get through these tight spots.
The caution that goes with this kind of checklist is obvious: You can score well with a rotten translation! But unless you have a Physpeak expert close by, it probably is the best you can do. So you don’t rank as a specialist; you don’t rank as a fool either.
* * * * I have described some features of a key sublanguage and approaches to the pitfalls it holds for nonscientists. What I have not tried to do is set you up in business as a finished Physpeak translator; you will find it a hard job becoming one, even if you have good academic training. The languages of science and technology have become part of the mainstream realm, and more than just sci-tech translators have to cope with them; with craft and a bit of luck, you can. | |||
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