The invisible work of translation

A good translation is noticed only when it fails. The reader meets a sentence that limps, looks up, and remembers that somebody stood between them and the original. The rest of the time the translator is invisible, which is both the point and the problem.

The difficulty is rarely vocabulary. Dictionaries handle words; they do not handle the fact that languages divide the world differently. Vietnamese distinguishes kinship terms that English collapses into cousin; English distinguishes tenses that other languages express with a particle or not at all. A translator must decide, sentence by sentence, which losses to accept.

Register causes more trouble than meaning. A phrase that is neutral in one language can sound bureaucratic, childish or rude in another, and the dictionary says nothing about this. The translator of a school report must know not only what the Vietnamese says but how a teacher in English would say something with the same force — which may be with different words entirely.

Machine translation has changed the work without ending it. For routine text it is fast and usually adequate, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. It is weakest exactly where human judgement matters: humour, implication, politeness, and any sentence whose meaning depends on knowing why it was written. The modern skill is therefore not to compete with the machine but to know which sentences must be checked.

For a language learner, translation has one more use, and it is private. Translating a paragraph into your own language and back again, then comparing with the original, exposes exactly what you did not understand. It is slow, unpleasant and more honest than any test score.