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It Needn't All Be Boring ...by Derry Cook-Radmore (Bath, UK)
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I am of that generation that after WW2 drifted into translation by chance, having
done a variety of other jobs beforehand; and I cannot help feeling that that previous
experiencelearning a lot about a lot of different thingsmay have been as good
as or perhaps a better preparation than todays more structured translator training,
where a language degree leads to a post-graduate translation course and then to
(usually) freelancing, with little time for building up a technical expertise or
two.
French learned at school was taught by French nationals; bolstered by contact
with Free French naval units stationed in Portsmouth, it gave a familiarity with the
language as it occurs in everyday use that, when recruiting in later years, I have often
found wanting in those with a UK modern-language degree (it seems that having, as
I did, French Litt. lectures and discussion in tutorials wholly in the language is far
from common). I have repeatedly found that someone who can cope admirably with
technical content will fall down badly when faced with what is a quite commonplace
turn of phrase in the source text.
A second and quite unplanned period of language learning came when, after
two years of art school, I was called up to the RAF, taught radar/wireless, and sent
for a couple of years to occupy Austria and feed Berlin by air: a bucolic Steiermark
accent took a long time to lose and still occasionally creeps back.
At this stage I didnt even know that translation existed as a way of making a
livingforeign languages were just for meeting and getting on with people. So while
demobilization led to a language degree at university, long vacations were spent as a
beach photographer and winter Saturdays selling ex-War Department film stock and
a cheap-and-nasty box camera, on commission, to local photo retailers. After
graduation, and a few months selling and installing what were then the new-fangled
TV sets, I managed one of those photo businesses, and then became a freelance
photographer doing (as my first wife was a radiographer who coached me in anatomy
and the basics of medicine) a fair amount of medical photography. My family saw all
this as a terrible waste of a BA degree, and were relieved when chancing across a
vacancy ad in the Daily Telegraph took me to the translation department of Philips NV
in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and a proper job!
All of which is a rather longwinded way of saying how valuable those wasted
years doing this-and-that proved to be. The wireless-mechanic background coupled
with the degree in French and German got me into Philips; and once there, I found
a niche handling all the sales literature for their medical equipment division. Back in
England a while later my RAF service and, after the job in Holland, real experience
in stringing words together for publication landed a post as a technical author on
aircraft instruments; there (adding to the elements of typography studied at art
school), I learned how to lay out and mark up text and liaise with a printer. It has
always puzzled me how little translatorsa sizeable proportion of whose work ends
up as books, brochures and manualsseem to know, or want to know, about how
the world of print works; and though the advent of computers and DTP may have
changed this, the use of fonts is indeed not something for the untrained and
insensitive. Yet a basic knowledge can bring dividends: I discovered, after in later
years competing for a contract to translate a sailing manual (another leisure activity
being put to use), that what had clinched the publishers choice was that I had pointed
out that, as German into English expands and there were hundreds of line blocks,
there would be copy-fitting problems, and had suggested a change in typeface and
leading; my editor commented that they had never had a translator who could talk
print before. It had made me stand out from the others.
It was not, however, until I joined the civil services Central Office of
Information as a translator that I began to learn what wordsmithing was really about,
and progressed through the stages of being revised, then working unrevised, and
finally revising others. As a person, my boss was what I suppose Americans would
call a real d.o.b.; but where the task was concerned she applied mercilessly high
standards for which I am forever in her debt. Besides being 100% accurate, the final
text also had to read well and clearly; in later years, teaching others, I was to find
myself echoing her dry comment The poor devils in committees have piles of this
stuff to wade through before their meetingsits up to us to at least make it easy for
them to read; your job is always to help the information slide smoothly into the
readers mind.
Those years set forever my approach: that my duty is primarily to the reader,
for whose sake I have to transmit the content of the original as clearly and digestibly
as possible. Not infrequently this means a degree of editing, of restructuring or
pruning, and it places a substantial demand on the translators judgment and on
gaining the customers trust in that judgment. I know this is an area where opinions
differ; and I know there are many textslegal agreements and patent specifications
are two obvious exampleswhere this will be out of place and strict adherence to the
original is essential. Fortunately, I have been able largely to avoid the kind of job
where a woolly, or awkward or deadly boring original has to be rendered warts and
all as a woolly, or awkward or deadly boring translation.
I have always thought that there are those in our trade who are by their nature
born freelances and others meant by their genes to be staffers, and that often there
are square pegs chafing in round holes. After several years as a civil servant, signing
the attendance book every day at 9 oclock and 5 oclock and hoping for someone
to
retire or be prematurely carried off so that we could all could move up one and wait
patiently for pensionable age to arrive, I was finding it desperately claustrophobic. I
judged I had by then learned my craft well enough to be trusted with customers on
my own; so having saved up 18 months income as a safety net, I cut myself off from
a monthly paycheck and went freelance. And started on twenty years of an exciting
and very varied life.
Talking to students about what being a freelance is like, I have tried to reassure
them that, once one is established, the life can be rewarding in both income and job-satisfaction. I
decided from the outset to deal mostly with work for publication and
virtually always for direct customers, and to look for these in niche markets where a
highly discriminating demand was likely to be having difficulty finding a satisfactory
supply, and was willing to pay well to get what it wanted; and to work in a very few
fields that I knew well enough to be able to converse with customers at a level that
would win their confidence. (Readers who regularly visit FLEFO will surely hear
echoes of Chris Durban, who preaches the same gospel).
At the same time as I went freelance in 1960, I was drawn by its Secretary into
the activities of the UK Translators Guild, which was working to bring some
structure into a burgeoning but still largely unorganized profession. Over the next
two decades I served twice as its Chair, met a lot of people, made a lot of friends, and
learned a lot about the world of translation at home and (through the Council of FIT)
abroad. My work pattern, too, was becoming more and more international; some
years, close on six months in total were spent working out of England. It all began
when the phone rang one Sunday morning, and a conference organizer said Were
desperate, and a friend of a friend thinks you may be able to help: weve a 2000-delegate
4-day conference in London, and though the interpretings all arranged,
theyve just decided they want overnight translation of each days minutes into
French, German, Italian and Dutch. Could you arrange the translating and foreign-language
typing? When? Four weeks from tomorrow. I gulped, tried to sound
confident, and promised to ring back the next day; and then spent an unbroken
twelve hours on the telephone, making calls all over Europe and being thankful for
my thick address-book. A new and unexpected niche market had opened up, and for
most of the 70s Edna and I were organizing language services for conferences in
places as far apart as Ankara and Colonial Williamsburg (we got to know a lot of
airport departure lounges). In parallel with this, a new clientele was also appearing
in the international organizations, with several of whom I spent a month at a time in
Brussels, Paris or Strasbourg, as translator or reviser on special projects or replacing
staff on sick-leave.
The stereotyped image of the freelance translator is of a lonely soul tied to a
computer keyboard in what used to be the spare bedroom, waiting for agencies to
ring offering jobs with a ridiculously short deadline, and enjoying little or no social
life. This is often what does happen; but my experience has shown it can be different
given (and this is an important proviso) the right temperament. Present economic
trends have forced a lot of square pegs into those uncongenial round holes, as people
meant by their nature to work inside a structured organization start in freelancing
because the big firms have scaled down their in-house translation teams. The
interesting opportunities come through knocking on doors: and not everyone enjoys
knocking on doors.
One of the international organization doors I knocked on (literallyI was
passing their office in Paris, and walked in and asked to speak to the head of
translation) was the European Space Research Organization, later to become ESA,
the European Space Agency; for each of the next 12 years I spent 6 to 8 weeks
working in their offices in Paris or near The Hague. After twenty years of
independence, I had sworn I would never, ever, go back on a payroll; but everyone
has their price, and when a reviser retired and ESA offered me the post I started on
13 years living in Paris that took me up to retirement and proved the happiest of all
my working life. It was an office that still took in tyros and trained them by the old,
labour-intensive sitting alongside method, and as chief reviser in the English
Section (and for the last six years Head of Translation Division) I was able to recruit
and train a series of young translators in much the same way as I had learned the job
40 years before: a satisfying way of handing skills and attitudes on to a new
generation.
Now, at 70, I am back freelancing again, as one of a fairly small band who
handle 15th-17th century Dutch art history. Seeing my words in print as each volume
appears, and knowing Im helping to pass on knowledge, gives me just the same buzz
it did when I produced my first brochure at Philips.
Its been always challenging, often taxing, sometimes exasperating. But its
never been boring.
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