Re: Translations of Owner's Guides?

[Jim Grey <jwg -at- ACD4 -dot- ACD -dot- COM>]

Once upon a long ago, I studied and practiced to earn a Certificate for
Technical Translation in German.  The two-year course taught me to translate
technical documents from German into English.  The number 1 thing drummed into
our heads was that we were *not* to alter the author's message.  The number
2 thing was that our translations were supposed to read naturally, and not
be merely literal.  This makes sense, but its practice was difficult.

German scientists and engineers write just as poorly as their english-speaking
counterparts.  It's institutional:  German technical readers have an unspoken
*expectation* that technical documents (as separate from user documentation)
are written in a complex, scholarly style.  Very often, a sentence I
translated turned into nearly unintelligible gobbledygook.  I ended up
breaking many sentences into several sentences, rearranging prepositional
phrases into possessives, changing passive to active.  These are the same
kinds of things I do, and I suspect you do as well, when you try to use an
engineer's usage notes in your documents.  I'm just trying to write clear,
direct English, which is what American technical readers presumably want.

Unfortunately, too much of this was considered "rewriting" and probably an
alteration of the author's message.  The course instructors maintained that
the American Translators Association (I think that's what it's called),
frowned deeply on this kind of thing.  The ATA is the translator's equivalent
to the STC, except I get the impression that without ATA affiliation, a
translator is a nobody.

If this kind of constraint is found worldwide, I wonder how effective
"sanctioned" translations really are.  I'm just one guy against a viewpoint
widely agreed-upon within a group of people who do this stuff for a living,
and am open to being wrong or misunderstanding.

I imagine user documentation is generally a different beast, since much
of it is written for a non-technical audience.  The few software manuals
I looked at when I was in Germany ten years ago (admittedly, before I ever
heard of technical writing as a profession) weren't too hard to read.  But
still, I'd hate to use the product's manual translated into English under
the translation constraint I faced.  The writing would still seem stiff
and stuffy.

As an amusing side note, I just got a new coffee pot, a Krups, made in
Germany.  The instruction booklet has a section on "Descaling and Potcleaning".
"Potcleaning" is typical German, while we'd say "Cleaning the Pot".
Fortunately, the ATA let us make this kind of substitution.  I bet these
instructions were translated into English by a native German speaker.

Peace,
jim grey
--
jim grey          |beebeebumbleandthestingersmottthehoopleraycharlessingers
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