Part 5. Translation as a profession

LISTENING 1. Interview between the journalist and Fiona Guiffs, the translator.

J. - In these days more and more people learn foreign languages, but this didn't reduce the demand for translators. As more and more nations trade with each other and have greater contact with each other, so more and more translators are required. But what exactly does the job involve? And what are the highs and lows of being a translator? I spoke to Fiona Guiffs, a translator for many years. And, first of all, I asked her what presents translators with the greatest difficulty?

F. - The worst problem, believe or not, has little to do with language, it has more to do with personality. I'm not talking about nationality, by the way. Because my experience is that you can find the same sorts of people anywhere. Now, what people are like as individuals causes the real trouble. I mean, take jokes, for example. You can be translating for somebody, and they say something that's meant to be funny and you just know the person you translate it to isn't going to find it the least that funny, because they have a totally different sense of humour. The whole thing falls flat and you feel terribly silly translating it.

J. - What made you want to be a translator?

F. - Well, of course, the fascination for language was the starting point. I mean from a very early age I had, I suppose, a gift for languages and I realized that I could pick them up very quickly. So when I left school, there wasn't really much doubt as to what I'll do at the university and then for a living. Also I thought it would be pretty well paid, that it would enable me to travel and to gain a real understanding of other cultures. And that it would give me job satisfaction because I would be helping people who speak different languages to get on together and work together.

J. - And has it all proved to be the case?

F. – Well, yes and no. The money side of it, certainly, hasn't turned out to be totally true. But at the same time, I suppose, I can’t really complain. I have traveled a lot and that's been quite enjoyable. Although, it's involved a lot of very hard work, too. I've learned an enormous amount about a variety of cultures and attitudes. But I couldn't honestly say that this has lead me to a real understanding of them. I mean, sometimes it's true that the more you learn, the less you know. People really aren't at all simple. And you soon find out that you can't generalize about nationalities. I would certainly say, though, that I do help people from different countries to work and socialize together and I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.

J. - Give me an example.

F. - Well, let me see. Yes, well, there was an occasion I was translating in a business meeting and a problem was clearly beginning to emerge. I was translating for a client in some rather delicate negotiations. But the other person clearly didn't like his manner. My client was, to be honest, being rather aggressive and uncooperative. And it looked to me, as if the other man was going to get up and storm out of the room any minute. So I started to translate my client's words, well, I made them a little bit softer, less direct, should we say. I mean, I translated it all properly, that's my job, but I phrased it slightly more politely than the original. And the atmosphere soon improved. By the end they reached the compromise they were both happy with and the meeting broke up with them being the best friends.

J. - And what's the worst situation you've been in as a translator?

F. - Oh, that's easy. I was translating for two politicians at a conference. And the one employing me really detested the other one. I mean, it was obviously a personal dislike. So he started insulting him and I had to translate all these terrible insults: I had no choice! He was the one paying me. It was just awful! I thought there was going to be a fight and I was worried that the other politician might hit me of something because, after all, I was the one actually saying all these terrible things to him. I was pretty bad to get to the end, I can tell you.

J. - So, all in all, is that the job you would recommend?

F. - Yes. Certainly, that kind of thing doesn't happen very often. But it's not as glamorous as some people seem to think. You do travel a lot, but it's hard work and you often don't see much of the places you visit. Most of the time I thoroughly enjoy my work. But I must admit it's tending to be boring sometimes. Certainly, you need to have, as I do, a real feel for languages. It's just not enough to have studied them, I really like working with them. I certainly can't imagine myself doing anything else.

J. - Thanks very much, Fiona. I've enjoyed very much talking to you.

LISTENING 2. Is something lost in translation?

Interviewer: If you read a great work of literature that’s been translated have you missed much of the meaning that was in the original? The Times columnist Michael Gove who also happens to be in the shadow cabinet wrote a few weeks ago that “reading translated literature involved a loss of nuance, a sacrifice of subtlety a few will admit to”. He received some furious replies not least from Professor Tony Briggs who translated Penguin’s “War and Peace”, he wrote “I would wince for your shrunken life if you have not yet read “War and Peace” and he also whole-heartedly disagreed with the premise that was put forward. Well both gentlemen join me now. Michael Gove, Professor Briggs, good morning to both.

Pr. B. and M.G. (together): Good morning.

Interviewer: Michael Gove, we’d better, first of all, set up what was it that prompted this comment.

M.G.: Well, I was thinking about the summer holidays, about what I was going to read and I have one prejudice which is that it is always better to try over the summer to go back to the classics than trying to keep up with contemporary fiction. But then when I was thinking about the classics one thought struck me. If I’m going to try and read any of the great classics like “War and Peace” for example I just know that they are not going to mean to me as much as they will to someone who has the original Russian. And the reason that I know that is that I know that when I read greatest English novelists, when I read Jane Austen or Charles Dickens it’s simply impossible for the grace, the wit, the nuance, the subtlety to be transferred. You know at the beginning of “Pride and Prejudice” when Jane Austen begins, you know, “Every man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” and if you don’t know that it’s a deeply ironic comment which is going to be a prelude to a subversion of that line, then you’re lost for most of the book. And I think you need to understand English and in particular you need to understand the particular tone of voice with the irony Austen uses in order to get it.

Interviewer: Professor Briggs, if that applies to English novels, then it must apply to Russian, French, whatever other countries’ novels?

Pr. B.: Well, you might think so. Too quick observations before we open up the line of response. First of all when I tuned in at 7 o’clock this morning before the programme began and what they were trailing was, over the workings of coincidence, this afternoon’s Saturday play an adaptation of a translation of a work by Alexander Solzhenitsin “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. From that you get the essential truth about the whole of the abused prison system called ‘Gulag’ in the Soviet Union. All the historians in Russia will tell you that that’s the best rendition of that and you get a huge amount of it by reading it in translation. Second observation, quick one, Michael, I don’t have much of a bind with you now because that you were gracious enough to say that some of your ideas have been proved to be in your own phrase ‘a ball’s ack’. It’s a response that came in from Matthew Parris he’s the one who deserves the full Sarah Pallin treatment for what he said. He virtually said that it is never any use reading any translation at all. Well, take the Solzhenitsin I’ve just mentioned. That’s a fairly difficult work to translate, because there’d be some technical terms to do with the building operations that people go out in and a lot of prison slang. So it will sound a little distorted in English but a very substantial amount of the truth will come over to you. Now as far as “War and Peace” is concerned it is right at the easier, more useful end of the spectrum of translation. If you take a tiny little poem «Я Вас любил, любовь еще быть может…» by Pushkin that’s going to be not just difficult, but impossible to translate, because it’s all language, nuance, tone and every syllable, every phoneme has to be in place and the other end of the spectrum is “War and Peace”.

Interviewer: Professor Briggs, I’m so sorry but we’re eating up our 5 minutes of allotted time so I must bring Michael, go back to the programme…

M.G.: Professor Briggs is so much more notable …

Interviewer: But let me… I want to turn you at just what the professor Briggs pointed out that I quoted in the introduction “I would wince for your shrunken life if you have not yet read “War and Peace” as he makes it out to you... you just can’t dive in half way through? Does it have a lesson?

M.G.: He does give some good advice. He’s acting, I suppose, as any evangelist of great literature should be on the basis that you have to do everything possible to make it palatable. But one of the reservations I still have is that Matthew Parris makes, I think, it a very well point of what Matthew was reading over the summer a work a few will have done – George Elliot’s “Scenes from Clerical Life” and he’d loved it. And the truth is that there are huge numbers of works by even first rate authors that we still don’t read and some second rate authors - J. Hogg, G. Meredith – in the English language which are still absolutely cracking reads. And if you devote yourself to them you get not just brilliant plots, not just something about human condition which is lasting but you also get a precision in the use of language which (for) anyone who loves literature is an added bonus.

Interviewer: Professor Briggs, can I ask you as briefly as possible? Haven’t you responded to that that when you read an English poem and it’s very hard to believe that it doesn’t lose something when it’s translated into another language?

Pr. B.: Michael, I think, has got it wrong, you know. If a mature educated, cultivated read person reads a translation of “War and Peace” he’ll probably get more out of it than a native speaker who is young and inexperienced, and perhaps reading it at a bad time and not concentrating. Each reading experience is unique. It’s very rare for people to read in such a way that they are conscious of every nuance and every little shift of meaning and so on. And for big works of prose it matters far less than it does in relation to lyric poetry.

Interviewer: Professor Tony Briggs, Michael Gove, thank you both.

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