ATA Conference Report
Posted by jeff on 05 Nov 2009 at 12:41 pm | Tagged as: Translation
I attended my first ATA conference last week in New York, and I’m definitely glad I went. There was something interesting in most of the presentations I went to, and it was good to actually be able to meet some other translators.
One thing I found out by attending is how incredibly under-represented Chinese translation is here in the US. There were tons of European languages represented, and even Japanese it seems had a bigger group than the Chinese one. In addition, I could probably count the native English speakers who translated Chinese that showed up on one hand. It still is puzzling to me why the most widely spoken language in the world had such a small turnout… perhaps it’s because most of the translators are located in China? Perhaps its the relatively short history of commercial Chinese translation? They are also trying to set up a Chinese to English certification exam, which is a tough problem, because they cannot find enough graders. I have run into this situation before–I have done trial translations for agencies who could not find anyone competent or willing to evaluate them (out of fear of competition I guess), or who sent me back evaluations that were pure nonsense, obviously not looked at by native speakers.
The talks I liked the best were probably the ones by interesting people who I have never heard of, such as the guy who does most of the subtitling for Korean dramas into English, and a talk by Edith Grossman, a translator of spanish literature. I also despereately needed to listen to the ergonomics talk, as I have been hunched over a busted up laptop for the past two years, and I don’t think my neck is doing to well. The only dissapointing thing was there really was no talk that was targeted at Chinese to English translators, apart from a discussion on how to translate ‘zheteng’ 折腾.
It’s a lonely old business, translating C>E while living in the West, isn’t it?! I taught at a translation summer school last year, and all the C>E group were native Chinese speakers. Oh, dear. (To be fair, one of the half-dozen was a true bilingual, which was great)
There are several fairly simple reasons why Chinese-to-English translation is carried out globally mainly by native Chinese speakers.
The most basic one is the fact that Chinese is a pain to learn, and it will be a decade or more before there are tens of thousands of Mandarin-literate English speakers out there! How many of them will be keen to work for peanuts as a translator is also an open question.
The other principal reason is economic. Via the Internet, native Chinese speakers with decent English can bid for translation projects anywhere, any time. Given that many such translators live in China, where living costs are much lower than in the West, their prices are intensely competitive.
Given that one cannot easily meet and test such translators for the true level of their English, some native Chinese speakers claim online to be native English speakers. I was a paying member of Proz.com, one of the largest translation web sites worldwide, and I occasionally read English-language entries on the BBS made by these imposters; it was painfully obvious that the grammatical errors they made were not typos that a native speaker of English would make.
Last — but not least — is the “mystery” that the Chinese language still evokes for much of the world. Many potential clients feel, deep down, that “only” a native Chinese can understand this language.
To close, a quick story about my job interview yesterday with an organ of the Shenzhen government. I applied to work as a language consultant and editor, and sent my resume which noted that I have lived in China almost 30 years, launched and run several Chinese B2B magazines, and translated full-length books such as “Shanghai Baby” and “Chinese Dress & Adornment through the Ages.”
When the coordinator handed her name card to me with the English side facing p, I turned it over and read her name out in Chinese.
“Oh, can you read Chinese?!” she exclaimed.
Bruce Humes
Chinese Books, English Reviews
http://www.bruce-humes.com