E-mail, Skype and other technologies have opened the door to cross-cultural communications, but they alone cannot bridge the language gap.

I perfectly realize that there are a lot of us translators there. But there are quite a few real professionals. It’s not enough to simply speak another language. There is a wealth of knowledge and background you need in your area of specialty.

Translation is far more than words and also far more than the context of words and phrases. Very many different issues are involved. And the spelling has to be impeccable.

Some businesses try to save on translation fees by using free computer programs, but those don’t offer the quality needed to avoid stilted and often nonsensical results.
Slavic grammar is complex, and developed differently than in other Indo-European languages, which means that sentences have to be construed in a very different manner.

The Russian language is full of words of intimacy or endearment. First, the Russian national character is expressive and emotional, and one aspect of it is that it has so many diminutive adjectives and nouns; second, the language itself offers a variety of ways to be expressive and emotional. One of them is suffixes. Russian is sometimes called the language of suffixes.

Russian suffixes express an extremely wide range of emotions and attitudes. They can produce words that are caressing, diminutive, familiar, vulgar or contemptuous.

Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka studied the way Russian suffixes work with Russian personal names. She says the meanings expressed by names with suffixes are so rich and complex they cannot be represented by simple labels such as “affectionate” or “scornful”. Some are ambivalent.

The suffix -ka (as in Lenka) may express familiarity or “anti-respect” but it becomes diminutive and even caressing in Lenochka.

The suffix –ik/ok is used with diminutive connotation when used with masculine names, e.g. Vladik or Sashok.  People use it when they talk to small boys and till they approach adolescence.

In English, suffixes are rarer, and they are less expressive. Most commonly, standard short forms such as Tom or Bill are used with regard to people one knows well. Sometimes, such short forms are preferred by the person and are used officially like Jimmy or Billy.

Translators of fiction face enormous problems rendering the expressive range conveyed by Russian suffixes. The mysterious craft of translation: it has to emerge from the whole — one must see it as a whole, and love it as a whole.

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In the burgeoning world of translators and interpreters it’s all about the niche.

“It’s not just having the language skill. It’s also having the expertise in the subject matter,” said Dahlberg, whose story was striking enough that Nicholas Hartmann, president of the American Translators Assn., retold it during the group’s 50th convention in New York last month.

I am pretty sure that I would leave the convention completely a different person and a better translator, if I was one of the lucky attendees. For four days, some 2,300 attendees networked, traded stories and listened in on workshops and seminars at a Times Square hotel.

That’s 1,000 more than attended last year’s conference — evidence that even in this economy, the industry is healthy.

Hartmann said demand for translators and interpreters is expected to grow by 15% in the coming year as globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide green movement spur demand for information in myriad languages.

E-mail, Skype and other technologies have opened the door to cross-cultural communications, but they alone cannot bridge the language gap.

It’s not enough to simply speak another language. There is a wealth of knowledge and background you need in your area of specialty.

“Translation is far more than words,” said Hartmann, who specializes in translating German patents. It requires him to understand not only the context of words and phrases, but also the technical and legal issues involved. And his spelling has to be impeccable.

The slightest error can cause extraordinary embarrassment.

If somebody is going to make a joke he better makes sure it translates well.
If a leader makes a joke that doesn’t elicit laughs, a good interpreter will say in the listening audience’s language, “It’s a joke that does not translate — please laugh.”

You wouldn’t translate something like “God bless you all” to the atheist audience to avoid embarrassment.

Despite the fact that niche translators and interpreters are “everybody’s lifeline,” they remain in short supply, particularly in U.S. government agencies.

The FBI said its translation workload had doubled since the Sept. 11 attacks. Hospitals, courts, schools and other institutions are struggling to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population.

But few people have the training it takes to do what can be an excruciatingly difficult job. I am not talking about weekends, but sometimes we have to translate or edit a large document in no time which means working many hours straight.

Some businesses try to save on translation fees by using free computer programs, but those don’t offer the quality needed to avoid stilted and often nonsensical results.
The mysterious craft of translation: it has to emerge from the whole — one must see it as a whole, and love it as a whole.

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Everybody is following the collisions in the web. Two media: internet and publishing business are watching each other and waiting for any blunder from each other’s side to grasp the situation and act immediately. If there is an article missing in a magazine; there is an immediate campaign on internet to publish the notorious article in translation, so that the readers can still read it.

So you can see the words ‘Russian translation’ everywhere nowadays. Russia achieved the pick of its popularity; I mean there is a lot of interest in what happens in Russia. It arouses many questions. So I guess, that Russian translators, like myself, are facing a new era.

And another tendency.

As the world gets smaller, readers are turning toward foreign fiction to understand other viewpoints. Far from being just the province of small independent publishing houses, literature in translation has become a mainstream phenomenon, with books that inspire huge bidding wars and literary debates.

There are very talented works of today’s young Russian writers, who speak modern Russian life to the world. And their stories are not lost in translation. Smart translation.

It is nice to believe, that people’s interest in Russian modern literature is growing. So the question is: can a philosophical novel, exploring the question of whether good can exist without evil, like “The Master and Margarita” be translated in such a way that it reads smoothly and fluidly like a bestseller?

Can we talk about a new translation, when, each phrase used in it appeared easily accessible and had a good rhythm. The characters are readily distinguishable from one another.

And the last but not the least. The top 10 countries ranked by Common Sense Advisory’s report “Countries That Matter Most Online in 2009″: U.S., Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, China and Australia. The top 10 languages that provide the biggest bang for a business’ buck are: English, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Russian and Swedish.

Even in far New Zealand there is a growing interest in the Russian phenomenon. I happened to be one of the first readers of the science fiction novel where the author tries to penetrate the Russian psyche in order to understand the modern history of the western mankind. The translation of this talented book would become a highlight of my carrier as a translator.

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The Internet continues to make the distance between people in different countries shorter and shorter. People, regardless of where they come from, are constantly interacting with one another. As we all know, not everyone speaks the same language. The English language is spoken by less than a third of Internet total users, in other words, out of 1.596 million Internet users; only 463 million use this language online, (followed by 321 million that use Chinese online). Less than 10% of the world’s most populated regions speak English: Asia, Africa and Latin America.

As a translator I am a witness of  the beginning of a new era that encourages expansion and contact between people of different cultures and languages. To this moment cultures were isolated by geographical, ideological and linguistic distances.

According to the theory of the six degrees of separation, only six chains separate any of us from another person in the world.

Online people are joined by their common preferences, interests and objectives.This opens the way for people to know each other because they share preferences in spite of having no prior relations in the past.They can exchange information, that depending on their personal interests, may be about scientific investigation, humanitarian or human rights, friendship, studies, etc. My task as a translator is to make the exchange possible.

This opens the way to an unexplored multiplication of the human knowledge, since the information in general, shall be nurtured by different cultural views and ideologies.

An important point to bare in mind, is that the exchange in between cultures, languages and ideologies is created in the users own language. This aspect is of fundamental importance, since contrary to the usual concept of globalization, which implicates the loss of identity, the online exchange is based on a totally new perspective, where users can still express themselves in their own language.

As a translator I belong to those who believe in the importance of cultural exchange and that a better world is possible thanks to worldwide cooperation, tolerance and respect of differences.

My point here is as far as there are human translators any obstacle in communication between people of different cultures and backgrounds can be solved in the name of better understanding and cooperation. Today I translate love letters of those two who want to be happy together and tomorrow I start a big project: translating documents which will allow two companies work together in the same direction. For me both things are of the same value.

Living in the 21st century means to follow the tendencies of the time. As a translator I realize that I have to apply new attributes of translation to make it more accessible.

They say that readers today have developed a text message way of seeing, meaning that their eyes grasp one entire section of text as an image and then go on to the next. For this reason, the sections cannot be too long: ideally, no longer than would fit on the screen of a cell phone or in a single manga picture.

The secret of this new translation may be that an unusually large number of paragraph breaks added to the novel. Text message readers can read the novel by passing from paragraph to paragraph as if from one manga image to the next. They are no less intelligent than their grandparents, but they have a different organ of vision, or a different cable connecting their retinas to their brains.

Each phrase used in the book has to be easily accessible and have a good rhythm. The odors and dust of a foreign society are suppressed.

I can imagine a modern translation of Brothers Karamasov where images alternate artfully with the dialogue.

Perhaps this is part of a global process in which visual thinking is taking on a more central role. And as a translator I accept the new rules.

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“You got it wrong,” retorted Lavrov, who informed her that “peregruzka” meant overcharge, not reset.  Presumably there was an empty desk at the US State Department the next day.

In his 1963 speech in Germany, the American President John F Kennedy told the world: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Debate exists to this day about the accuracy of the statement, but some language pedants still chuckle to themselves about the fact that Kennedy announced himself as a jelly doughnut and not as a citizen of Berlin (a “Berliner” being both a resident of the city and a doughnut).

President Carter also fluffed a remark in 1977 when, on a visit to Poland, he told the gathered crowd that he wanted to understand their “desires for the future”. The following day, there was good-humoured ridicule in the Polish press when it transpired that his translator had mistaken “desires” for “lusts”.

Earlier this year, America found itself the wrong-footed one when Mirek Topolánek, the former prime minister of Czechoslovakia, accused the US of funding economic stimulus packages by selling bombs. Turns out that Topolánek’s translator had mistranslated “bombs” and “bonds”.

Other countries have had their fair share of translation malfunctions, too. In 2003 Jacques Chirac, then president of France, landed himself in diplomatic hot water after telling several Eastern European countries to “shut up” about the impending Iraq war. (“These countries missed a good opportunity to shut up,” he was reported as saying.)

The French verb “se taire” had been interpreted as to “shut up” instead of the more tactful to “remain silent”.

But then think of the riches that translators have given to the world over the centuries. Myriad ancient texts and advances in science and arts would have been denied without their help. And reflect on the fact that the world may have between 5,000 and 10,000 languages (Wikipedia announces this rather vague number, so it must be true). Really, it’s little wonder that standards occasionally slip.

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1. Read the book and generalize the main idea and a concept.

2. Project this idea onto your own language culture.

3. Define the language means conveying the message.

Accordingly, before embarking on the rendering of a book a translator establishes a set of priorities to help shape it. To create a cultural context more suited to the target language speakers and avoid completely the common practice among translators- just translate the words of the originals- a translator has to do a lot of thinking and a lot of research.

“Like all translations, it’s just infinitely intricate. I always say it’s like opening up the back of a fine watch and getting in there with the world’s smallest tools.” (A Canadian playwright and translator John Murray)

While some problems with translations are common among all languages, translating from any Western European language to a Slavic one carries the additional problem of grammar. Slavic grammar is complex, and developed differently than in other European languages, which means that sentences have to be construed in a very different manner. Many of those things that are said with the use of idioms in English need to apply special grammatical structures in Russian.( More about idioms find in my recent posting)

It’s the kind of work you can only do with love. You have to love every syllable of the text. And you have to think everything that has to have meaning and resonance.

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