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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—Ensuring Quality in Japanese-to-English Translation By Phil Robertson (Since the terms “translation” and “interpreting” are often confused, it is worth reiterating that “translation” refers solely to the rendering of the written word into another language. The terms “source language” and “target language” refer respectively to the language of the original text and the language into which it is translated. The following abbreviations are also used: J2E for “Japanese-to-English”, NSE for “native speaker of English” and NSJ for “native speaker of Japanese”.) Something is rotten in the state of the J2E translation market in Japan. In Europe it is axiomatic that a translator should only translate into his or her own native language. Thus, only a native German speaker will undertake an English-to-German translation. The rationale is that even a person who has studied another language extensively will inevitably have a greater “active” command of his native language than of his second language. The term “active” denotes the ability to identify the proper word in a given context, to use technical terminology and idiom, and to accurately craft natural-sounding sentences. (Correspondingly, “passive” facility denotes the ability to comprehend text or speech in the language.) A true bilingual may have an equally well developed active facility in two languages, but such people are extremely rare. Translation is essentially a two-stage process—thorough comprehension of the source text followed by precise rendition of the meaning into the target language in written form. Only the second stage—writing—requires an active command of the target language. Thus a translator ought to be a native speaker of the target language, not the source language. Moreover, few people write well in their own native language (let alone in one they have acquired). The number of people who can also write well in a second language is much lower—the large majority undoubtedly being people working in pairs of languages that are structurally similar, such as Japanese and Korean. For a language pair as structurally dissimilar as English and Japanese, people with strong writing ability in both are virtually non-existent. |
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