The "Translation Mission" has been frequently searching recently.
How can diplomatic translators become the masters of diplomatic translators?
◎Zhang Yuan
Zhang Lu, who has just been promoted to the Deputy Director-General of the Translation Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, conquered many people with her stable and outstanding translation at the Prime Minister's press conference during the two sessions this year.
On March 18, at the Sino-US high-level strategic dialogue meeting, the excellent performance of the delegation interpreter Zhang Jing once again made the "Diplomatic Translator Tian Group" a hot search on Weibo.
Although diplomatic translation has always been regarded as a lofty position, the occasional pit of translators from all over the world can make people laugh.
The Australian diplomat Woolcott recalled in his book that when he gave a speech in Indonesia, the interpreter made the entire sentence not quite right because of the translation error; sometimes the translation error can also bring serious consequences, the interpreter’s mistakes It made former US President Carter the laughingstock of the Polish people.
This shows that diplomatic translation is not appropriate.
This position not only requires the translator to have the ability to listen and write shorthand, but also to constantly improve, be flexible, and maintain sufficient energy to deal with problems at all times.
They are not only witnesses of history, but also under tremendous pressure.
Whether the rapid development of machine translation can replace humans to complete the arduous task of translation is still unknown.
The person in charge of Skype maintains a positive attitude towards the prospects of machine translation, but a series of problems with Google Translate have caused people to doubt the reliability of machine translation.
Those "pits" that diplomatic translators have entered
In everyone's minds, diplomatic interpreters are always rigorous and knowledgeable. They convey information and assist in the completion of dialogues between countries. The accuracy requirements of translation are therefore fully reflected in this major event of diplomacy.
However, even so, in the face of some translation traps, experienced translators will inevitably stumble, so that everyone can have fun in a tense atmosphere.
Richard Woolcott served as Australia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1988 to 1992. He served as an advisor to several Australian prime ministers including William McMahon and Harold Holt. He also served in the United Nations and Europe. , Southeast Asia and Africa as diplomats.
In his book "Diplomatic Embarrassment", he recalled a speech he made when he visited Palembang as the Australian ambassador to Indonesia.
In the speech, he said: "Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of my wife and myself, I express that we are very happy to come to Palembang." But the translator changed the meaning: "Madam Gentlemen, on top of my wife, I am very happy to come to Palembang." This confused the audience for a while.
This is nothing compared to what happened to Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States.
Steven Seymour is a part-time interpreter with a daily salary of US$150. He was the best Polish interpreter at the time as the Language Services Department (a department dedicated to providing foreign language interpretation and translation support to the US State Department, the White House and other federal agencies) Member, was assigned to travel with Carter.
Carter arrived at Warsaw Airport on December 29, 1977, and the "nightmare" began.
When Carter began to respond lyrically to the welcome of the Polish leader Girek, 31-year-old Seymour translated for him.
Carter first said that he is very happy to come to Poland.
Somehow, the words were translated as saying that he had defected to the United States to live in Poland; secondly, Carter praised the Polish Constitution of 1791 as one of the three great representatives of the human rights spirit in the 18th century.
The translation given by Seymour made people think that Carter was mocking the constitution: considering how Polish political parties treat the spirit of the above constitution, this is a good thing in itself.
In the end, Carter still smiled and announced that he wanted to understand the interests of the Poles (desire), but Seymour changed it into an embarrassing "sex" interest, which allowed the president to experience "social death" directly.
It is conceivable that this translator must have been "fired".
But Carter's bad luck hasn't passed yet, in order to participate in the state banquet, Carter has found a new translator.
During the state banquet speech, when Carter finished speaking the first sentence, he intentionally paused to wait for the translator to translate, but the translator ignored him. After speaking the second sentence, the translator remained silent.
It turned out that the new translator didn't understand Mr. President's English at all, so he decided that rather than making more mistakes, it was better to "silence is golden."
Carter's Polish trip is not over yet, and the hapless president has become the laughing stock of many Poles.
Translation errors can sometimes have a serious impact on negotiations.
The French word "demander" expresses a request, but the 1830 US-French talks caused a feverish relationship between the two parties because of the unclear understanding of this word.
A message starting with "le gouvernement fran?ais demande" (requested by the French government) was sent to the White House, but the secretary translated the sentence into "strong request from the French government", making the US think that France had proposed a series of tough measures. Immediately refuse and wait until the misunderstanding is resolved before the negotiation can continue.
Diplomatic translation is not easy
From the many oolong incidents above, it can be found that "diplomacy is no small matter" and translation is no small matter.
In order to become an excellent diplomatic translator, in addition to superb business ability, you also need to sharpen comprehensive skills in many ways.
1. Listening and shorthand are basic skills and eye contact is not to be missed
Diplomatic interpreters must be able to correctly understand conference talks or speeches, quickly record key words, and accurately translate their main ideas, in order to promote the normal progress of the topics discussed at the conference.
Not only do they need to master all the skills of a conference interpreter, but the diplomatic particularity of their work also requires them to learn other skills.
For example, during a state banquet, when many people are speaking at the same time, the diplomatic interpreter must pay a high degree of attention to identify the source of the sound, and at the same time pay attention to the volume of the translation, so that the target object can clearly hear the content of the translation.
The translator Maria Rosaria Brie said in her article "Translation of Diplomatic Circumstances" published in 2015: "Skilled in two or more languages, able to express opinions clearly and clearly, and familiar with different cultural backgrounds is All interpreters must have abilities. In diplomatic occasions, good sound projection and volume adjustment can add to the translation. This is not only because microphones are rarely used in diplomatic translation, but also because in these occasions, whispering simultaneous interpretation , Or whispered interpreting, is also more common."
Diplomatic interpretation requires not only the basic skills of interpreting such as super memory and shorthand, but also keen insight and observation. This requires the interpreter to observe the state of the interlocutor at all times, and even the eye contact cannot be missed.
Translators sometimes need non-verbal assistance such as body language, gestures, and intonation to convey the most accurate translation.
2. Professional background knowledge depends on accumulation
When translators just started, they were mostly exposed to everyday language and common industry-specific words. However, as the difficulty of translation increases, the knowledge of translators will also be broadened.
It is never simply a matter of finding an equivalent word or substituting one word for another. The translator must understand the expresser’s thoughts and their potential meanings.
The translator must know enough professional terminology and background information, including all the knowledge in the relevant fields of each task, after all, you can't explain things that you don't understand.
On October 23, 2000, the 64th U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with North Korean leaders. Tong Kim, a senior Korean translator for the U.S. State Department, was Albright’s entourage.
Tang Jin learned a lot of professional terminology for this meeting.
He recalled, “When I first started translating, I spoke like a Korean, but they didn’t seem to buy it. Later, I improved my accent. I learned the Korean language, their intonation, and their dialect. , Which gives them a little trust in us."
3. Flexibility requires wisdom
In diplomatic translation, there will always be various emergencies, such as the expresser suddenly popping out words that are beyond the scope of the translator’s knowledge, or translation jams caused by cultural differences, all of which require diplomatic translators to have a strong tolerance. And the ability to be flexible.
In the book "Diplomatic Embarrassment", the author Woolcott mentioned that former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke used slang "I am not here to play funny buggers" in response to Japanese legislation. A question raised by the author, but for Japanese translators, this oral language has become a very difficult problem. They collectively discussed how to accurately express "funny buggers" in Japanese.
Finally, the translators translated this sentence into "I am not here to make fun of the boring and tasteless things of making fun of gay people", so that the audience can understand the meaning of this slang more intuitively.
"Sometimes, the best translation is without translation," Woolcott wrote.
"For example, an Asian minister told a long joke at a banquet in Seoul. The Korean translator didn't know how to translate, but he didn't show it. After he said a few words, the audience laughed and applauded. Then, he became a minister. When expressing his high praise for his translation skills, the Korean translator confessed to the real reason for the laughter, "To be honest, Minister, I didn’t understand your jokes, so I said in Korean. If the minister tells him, he must say it. Jokes, please laugh and applaud to your heart's content.'"
4. Fortunately to witness history, but also under pressure
Diplomatic interpreters are the indirect recipients of tensions within the government, which sometimes affects their working status.
During the former U.S. President Nixon’s administration, Nixon and the then National Security Assistant Henry Kissinger did not trust the State Department and had a poor relationship with Secretary of State William Rogers. Sometimes they refused to let interpreters attend meetings because they were worried that they would inform Rogers. .
But at the same time, diplomatic interpreters are also witnesses to history. They are fortunate to witness major events that will be recorded in the annals of history. This of course also means more pressure and responsibilities.
In 1990, when the 41st President of the United States Bush and Soviet leader Gorbachev discussed the "Open Sky Treaty", the Soviet translator Kochilov said "verifying" in English when translating Gorbachev's words. The verifier refers to the United States at the time, rather than the term "verified" (the verified party refers to the Soviet Union at the time).
Everyone in the conference room looked at him at the time, and Gorbachev quickly reacted: "No, no. I never said..."
The two words seem to be similar, but the talks are centered around the "Open Skies Treaty."
The treaty states that the two parties can conduct aerial reconnaissance in each other's territory to verify their implementation of the arms control treaty.
At that time, the Soviet Union and the United States did not agree on whether to use the inspector (US) or the inspected (Soviet) aircraft to conduct surveys. Kochilov mistranslated Gorbachev’s words as “carrying out over the territory. The plane to be investigated must be provided by the inspector (that is, the United States)," which is equivalent to Gorbachev "agreeing" with the United States' view.
Later, in Kochilov's memoirs, he wrote: "At that time I really wished to get into the cracks in the ground..."
Due to the nature of translation tasks, many diplomatic interpreters often work alone and work for several hours.
Although team work is feasible for conference work (usually in press conferences, this situation is possible), but during the entire conference process, the long consecutive interpretation is usually completed by the same diplomatic interpreter , Which requires interpreters to have strong perseverance and good health.
In addition, the innuendo hedging in the diplomatic conference and the subtle use of language have kept interpreters in a high-pressure environment for a long time.
At the highest level of closed-door meetings, interpreters are facing pressure from global diplomacy. Every word is important, and a mistake may have serious consequences.
Former US President Trump is a typical case that makes interpreters very headache. He is notoriously unreasonable to play cards.
His former campaign adviser Anthony Scaramucci once said, "Don't understand him literally, understand him symbolically." The Washington Post has also reported on his inappropriate language.
"The Tower of Babel" reappears-can machine translation replace human translation?
Since it takes so much effort to do diplomatic translation, can machine translation, which has been rapidly developed with the advancement of science and technology, replace people as future diplomatic interpreters?
In December 2014, the official Skype account uploaded a video on YouTube, and the video received more than one million views.
In the video, there are two elementary school students wearing headphones-one living in Washington and the other from Mexico. They speak different languages, English and Spanish, but can communicate without barriers.
This is because the Skype instant messaging software realizes the real-time interpretation function between English and Spanish, and you can communicate with people from all over the world by wearing headphones. This is like the reappearance of the ancient "Babel", and it looks like science fiction. The scenes of the novel are restored, and all this is due to the development of machine translation technology.
Machine translation (machine translation), also known as automatic translation, is the process of using a computer to transform one natural language into another natural language.
Although machine translation has broad prospects, its development history has not been smooth sailing.
The research history of machine translation can be traced back to the 1930s and 1940s when the French scientist GB Arcuni put forward the idea of using machines for translation.
In the same year, Soviet scientist Peter Troyansky was also designing the blueprint of the translator, but it was a pity that Peter Troyans had suffered from angina pectoris and was tortured, and he did not build the machine.
It was not until 1956 that his design drawings were discovered.
However, the development of machine translation has not stopped. With the iterative update of the Internet, in 1997, Systran developed the world's first web page machine translation tool attached to the Alta Vista search engine; in 1999, Microsoft developed Microsoft Translator; In 2006, Google released Google Translate.
Nowadays, any unrecognized paragraph can be placed in any search engine, and its translation explanation can be immediately jumped out. Machine translation has already penetrated all aspects of our lives.
Most people are still positive about the prospects of machine translation. The vice president of Skype said in a blog post, “Skype Translator will open up unlimited possibilities. It relies on machine learning, which means the more technology is used, The smarter it is, that is, as more people use it, the quality of translation will continue to improve."
However, Reuters reported on April 19, 2021 that the translation tools provided by Google and other companies may lead to misunderstandings of related concepts. For example, Google’s translation software converted an English sentence about court prohibition of violence into Kana. When the language is spoken, it becomes "the court ordered the use of violence."
Google said in this regard that machine translation "is still only a supplement to professional translation," and the accuracy of machine translation still needs to be continuously improved.
"Financial Times" author Simon Kuper also stated in an article on April 21, 2021, "Machine translation is usually problematic. Machines cannot communicate through body language or eyes, and even some algorithms are discriminatory. For example, in a genderless language (such as Turkish), the algorithm assumes that engineers can only be men."
It is undeniable that machine translation occupies an increasingly important position in our lives, but we should also not forget that the original intention of translation is to satisfy the human desire for communication.
Whether machine translation can replace professional translators in the end is still inconclusive, but all those who work hard for human communication should not forget their achievements.