Translating academic texts is an area I’ve been increasingly concentrating on in my work. Due to my own interests and academic background, I enjoy working on such texts and feel more confident that I can produce good translations, even if German academic language can sometimes be rather daunting (to put it mildly). However, it’s a field that’s often neglected within the translation industry and translation associations. This is especially true at the humanities/social sciences end of the spectrum, which tends to be bundled together with literary or arts translation if it’s taken into consideration at all (it’s not covered by any of the ITI subject groups, for instance).
One notable exception is the Facebook group SOS!-Academic Translators, which was set up specifically to cater for this gap in provision and brings together translators specialising in various academic fields. It was through this group that I was alerted to a BDÜ event that sounded right up my street: a two-day workshop on “Die Übersetzung (populär-)wissenschaftlicher Texte im Sprachenpaar Englisch-Deutsch” (translating academic texts for general and specialist audiences in the language pair English–German). It sounded like a great opportunity both to improve my skills in one of my preferred fields of work (building on my mentoring from earlier in the year) and to meet other translators working in this area, including members of the SOS!-Academic Translators group. So last week, I travelled to Osnabrück in northern Germany to attend the seminar.
One notable exception is the Facebook group SOS!-Academic Translators, which was set up specifically to cater for this gap in provision and brings together translators specialising in various academic fields. It was through this group that I was alerted to a BDÜ event that sounded right up my street: a two-day workshop on “Die Übersetzung (populär-)wissenschaftlicher Texte im Sprachenpaar Englisch-Deutsch” (translating academic texts for general and specialist audiences in the language pair English–German). It sounded like a great opportunity both to improve my skills in one of my preferred fields of work (building on my mentoring from earlier in the year) and to meet other translators working in this area, including members of the SOS!-Academic Translators group. So last week, I travelled to Osnabrück in northern Germany to attend the seminar.
The seminar was held across two whole-day sessions led by Dirk Siepmann, professor of English language teaching at Osnabrück University. There were around 20 participants, mostly Germans but also five native English speakers. Dirk guided us through a series of exercises that we worked on individually and in pairs before discussing different solutions as a group. The exercises were mainly in the direction German to English (though there were some English to German exercises too). We compared different principles of text construction in the two languages: English texts are more reader-oriented, assuming less prior knowledge on the part of the reader, and follow what is known as a theme–rheme structure where each sentence begins by picking up on or linking back to something that has already been mentioned or established, before adding further information to it. English also tends to use verbal structures and mention concrete human agents where German prefers nominalisations and abstract concepts. At the same time, some myths were dispelled, such as that passives should be avoided in English or that English always prefers shorter sentences than German (German academese sometimes loves extremely compact, gnomic sentences). We practised correcting existing English translations and translating short texts ourselves according to these principles.
On the whole, I found that while it was interesting to explicitly learn about some of the grammatical rules and textual principles that I have an intuitive grasp of as a native speaker, I’m not sure how useful it will be in actual practice. In theory, I can imagine this sort of explicit understanding being helpful when working between languages, where source language interference can disrupt our intuitions. It might also be particularly helpful for editing texts written in English by German speakers. Moreover, being attentive to how texts hang together coherently as a whole is also important in order to avoid the focus on the micro level encouraged, for instance, by translation software that breaks up texts into discrete segments. However, in the work I’ve done since the seminar I’ve not yet found cases where consciously applying these principles has helped me to come up with a better translation. But then again, it’s only been three days so far.
On the whole, I found that while it was interesting to explicitly learn about some of the grammatical rules and textual principles that I have an intuitive grasp of as a native speaker, I’m not sure how useful it will be in actual practice. In theory, I can imagine this sort of explicit understanding being helpful when working between languages, where source language interference can disrupt our intuitions. It might also be particularly helpful for editing texts written in English by German speakers. Moreover, being attentive to how texts hang together coherently as a whole is also important in order to avoid the focus on the micro level encouraged, for instance, by translation software that breaks up texts into discrete segments. However, in the work I’ve done since the seminar I’ve not yet found cases where consciously applying these principles has helped me to come up with a better translation. But then again, it’s only been three days so far.
Thematically appropriate reading material in the hotel lobby
For me, what was most valuable was some of the incidental remarks that came up in the course of discussion and, especially, some of the specific translation suggestions and approaches that Dirk and other participants presented. It was instructive to see very elegant, straightforward solutions to terms that might cause me consternation if they came up in a real job, and to realise that a small shift in how you think about a sentence or word can quickly resolve what seem like tricky problems. Simply “(companies in) trade and industry” for “Industrie- und Handelsunternehmen”, for instance, or “background” for “Ausgangslage”. Other participants also contributed some useful specialist knowledge: for instance, the use of “adverse effects” rather than “side effects” in medicine, or the term “road traffic collisions (RTCs)” rather than “traffic accidents” in formal contexts (something that reminded me, naturally, of Hot Fuzz). Being in a group environment and, in my case, without internet or computer proved a refreshing change that forced me to try out different ways of working and thinking. Though I think I’ll stick to the solitary office with my desktop for the day-to-day work!
Going into the seminar, one of my concerns was that it would mainly be aimed at German translators, and I questioned how much I would benefit as a native English speaker. However, the “native speaker advantage” wasn’t always as big a help as you might expect. Many of the German native speakers had an excellent grasp of English and came up with some very good suggestions. And Dirk in particular was perfectly happy to hold his own against the English native speakers in the room, confidently pointing out why some of our translation suggestions were “not very good” or showing examples drawn from corpora where native speakers used formulations that we flat-out denied were possible or common in English. I didn’t always agree with Dirk’s suggestions or assertions, even when backed up by corpora (since the mere fact that a formulation has previously been used elsewhere by native speakers doesn’t mean it was necessarily good style or applicable in other contexts – such findings are, of course, still subject to interpretation), but then disagreement is possible even with other native speakers, and sometimes simply reflecting on and clarifying the precise source of disagreement was helpful in and of itself.
The flipside to the English native speaker “advantage” was that most of the seminar was conducted in German and some of the exercises involved translation into German. The latter in particular was very challenging but valuable, and I felt like I was reactivating a set of skills I’ve barely used since university, since of course translation primarily involves reading rather than writing German. There are valuable nuances to be learned about the source language from seeing how the translation process works in the other direction. I found it particularly interesting, for example, to see how many difficulties were posed by the English term “sophisticated” (which ended up being rendered variously as souverän, kultiviert, raffiniert, ausgeklügelt, mondän, elegant, fein, anspruchsvoll).
Going into the seminar, one of my concerns was that it would mainly be aimed at German translators, and I questioned how much I would benefit as a native English speaker. However, the “native speaker advantage” wasn’t always as big a help as you might expect. Many of the German native speakers had an excellent grasp of English and came up with some very good suggestions. And Dirk in particular was perfectly happy to hold his own against the English native speakers in the room, confidently pointing out why some of our translation suggestions were “not very good” or showing examples drawn from corpora where native speakers used formulations that we flat-out denied were possible or common in English. I didn’t always agree with Dirk’s suggestions or assertions, even when backed up by corpora (since the mere fact that a formulation has previously been used elsewhere by native speakers doesn’t mean it was necessarily good style or applicable in other contexts – such findings are, of course, still subject to interpretation), but then disagreement is possible even with other native speakers, and sometimes simply reflecting on and clarifying the precise source of disagreement was helpful in and of itself.
The flipside to the English native speaker “advantage” was that most of the seminar was conducted in German and some of the exercises involved translation into German. The latter in particular was very challenging but valuable, and I felt like I was reactivating a set of skills I’ve barely used since university, since of course translation primarily involves reading rather than writing German. There are valuable nuances to be learned about the source language from seeing how the translation process works in the other direction. I found it particularly interesting, for example, to see how many difficulties were posed by the English term “sophisticated” (which ended up being rendered variously as souverän, kultiviert, raffiniert, ausgeklügelt, mondän, elegant, fein, anspruchsvoll).
This cheery cut-out served the typically sumptuous spread at the morning and afternoon tea breaks.
The seminar is run (I believe) annually, and is open to non-BDÜ members. It is relatively expensive compared with other translation workshops and events I have been to (I paid €470 for an early-bird non-BDÜ ticket, which was more than the ITI Conference, for example), and I’m not entirely convinced the price would be justified if you’re on a tight budget (though of course there’s far more expensive training out there too, sometimes I’m sure with much less content). It’s also important that you feel confident in your German spoken and listening skills in order to get the most out of the seminar.
Personally, I think I took away more valuable, concrete lessons from this workshop than I did from other events less focused on the nitty-gritty of actual language and translation. Aside from the lessons I learned about the translation process itself (much of it applicable far beyond academic texts alone), I was particularly interested in Dirk’s demonstrations of how corpora can be used as a more targeted tool than Google search for investigating how terms are used in particular fields (as an interim step, I’ve invested in a corpus-based collocations dictionary). I felt right at home being back in a “classroom” environment, learning and reflecting on practice, and have a reawakened interest in honing my grasp of German.
Personally, I think I took away more valuable, concrete lessons from this workshop than I did from other events less focused on the nitty-gritty of actual language and translation. Aside from the lessons I learned about the translation process itself (much of it applicable far beyond academic texts alone), I was particularly interested in Dirk’s demonstrations of how corpora can be used as a more targeted tool than Google search for investigating how terms are used in particular fields (as an interim step, I’ve invested in a corpus-based collocations dictionary). I felt right at home being back in a “classroom” environment, learning and reflecting on practice, and have a reawakened interest in honing my grasp of German.
RSS Feed
