Translation and cultural differences

Saturday's congress of translators gave me the chance to ponder some more on the linguistic and cultural space between Britain and Poland.

The 20th Century saw the English language evolve in the direction of clarity. Winston Churchill and George Orwell both understood the power of clarity in communication. If you want people to listen to you, and act upon what you say, use short words and short sentences, avoid pomposity and get to the point. The Plain English Campaign, launched in 1979, accelerated this direction. The Campaign wages war against gobbledegook and jargon wherever it may appear – in official letters, in the small print of insurance documents, in legal opinions, in press releases, in banks' advertising materials.

The results are there for all to see. Look at the sheer brilliance of the UK government's website, Gov.uk. What's the current threshold for paying VAT in the UK? Three clicks from the homepage and you know. Marvel at the clarity of the information: "You must register for VAT with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) if your business’ VAT taxable turnover is more than £82,000." Crystal clear! [I challenge you to find out what the VAT threshold is in Poland from the Ministry of Finance's website. How many clicks away from the homepage?]

It was not always thus; compare today's English with the language as used in Victorian times. Here's Charles Dickens, in full flow; from Dombey and Son (1848): "The Major, standing in the shade of his own apartment, could make out that an air of greater smartness had recently come over Miss Tox's house; that a new cage with gilded wires had been provided for the ancient little canary bird; that divers ornaments, cut out of coloured card-boards and paper, seemed to decorate the chimney-piece and tables; that a plant or two had suddenly sprung up in the windows; that Miss Tox occasionally practised on the harpsichord, whose garland of sweet peas was always displayed ostentatiously, crowned with the Copenhagen and Bird Waltzes in a Music Book of Miss Tox's own copying." This is a single sentence, composed of 104 words. Churchill and Orwell's legacy to the ages is that English literature will never revert to Dickensian logorrhea.

I reach for Moni's copy of Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000). Crisp prose. No waffle. Average sentence length around 24 words, two lines of 11/13pt Monotype Dante.

The reader of English today – for whatever purpose, business or pleasure, expects that the author will make the effort to make themselves understood. It is no longer the duty of the reader to try to unscramble the author's intent. Writing waffle has become unacceptable.

So – when translating from Polish (where clear writing is not well established) to English (where it is an imperative), how much onus is on the translator to improve the author's original clarity of thought in the source language?

If the intended recipient is someone from Britain, accustomed to clear sentence structure based around a strong verb, will a direct translation of a Polish sentence into English have the intended effect on the reader? A call to action?

From the website of one of Poland's 14 Special Economic Zones... "Following the submission of the Letter of Intent by the Investor as well as its verification, the Zone Manager publishes an invitation to tender (if the tenderer applies in total for a Permit and the acquisition of rights to the real estate or other assets which are located in the Zone) or an invitation to negotiations (if the tenderer applies solely for the Permit, having the legal title to the real estate or other assets located in the Zone, or holding a document which reliably proves the possibility of them obtaining such a title) in the daily international press, on the Zone's website and, possibly, in the foreign press." OK. 109 words. Dickensian. [By the way, where's the principal verb in this sentence?] Yet this is a faithful and accurate translation of what's on the Polish pages of this SEZ's website. 

Ale czy o to chodzi?

The target group of the above text, English-speaking managers of potential investors considering this SEZ, will subconsciously see this merely as proof that procedures for entering the Zone are onerous, formalistic and overly bureaucratic, and therefore probably a waste of time. And invest elsewhere.

My point is this. When translating from Polish into English, the translator – and the author – and the author's ultimate boss – must all understand that cultural barriers need to be bridged. In Britain it is not the sign of intelligence and education to go waffling on at ten to the dozen. Rather the reverse. Waffle is used by intellectually insecure people to hide their inability to think clearly.

And yet when I explained all this in Lublin on Saturday, I was met with some scepticism. "In Poland," one legal translator told me, with an entirely straight face, "clients expect their lawyers to write pages and pages of waffle. It's what they pay them to do."

Clearly then, it is high time for a Plain Polish Campaign. Educating both the writer and the reader as to the benefits of clear written and oral communication is essential. Language can be a source of competitive advantage for those countries that value clarity.

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Honing the Art of the Written Word

I spent much of the weekend (the third one in a row), with Ziggy going over our translations of General Stefan Bałuk's wartime memoires, Byłem Cichociemnym. The fact that the very title has undergone revision since its first translation shows what a gruelling task this has been. Originally, we'd settled on The Silent, Dark Ones. Now, the book's English title will be Silent and Unseen.

This work has been a great learning experience for me. The actual translation itself did not take that long - I translated around a fifth of the book, the last 57 pages or three chapters in 12 days, around my normal working routine (evenings and weekends). The real work was to take our raw translation of the General's text and beat it into something that reads perfectly in English. Right: General Stefan Bałuk, 95, earlier this month at the commemoration of the 65th Anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising.

And it has to be perfect. The difference between a first-rate narrative told in second-rate translation and one translated so that it doesn't actually read like a translation is the difference between a something that shifts a few hundred copies and a best-selling history. My bookshelves are littered with poorly translated titles. Example. The Polish edition of Norman Davies's Europa. It shows what happens when publisher is in too much of a rush to check it thoroughly first. General Franco's mausoleum, we learn here, is in the valley of the river Fallen. (Valle de los Caídos in Spanish, translated into English as Valley of the Fallen, then translated into Polish by someone who really should know better as 'dolina rzeki Fallen').

So we spent a lot of time checking facts. Wikipedia makes this easier (today I needed to know how the Hungarian dance, spelt czardasz in Polish, is spelt in English*. Heavens knows how else one would have found this out without access to a reference library or Mastermind-grade general knowledge.) Wikipedia alone is not the absolute arbiter; facts needed checking and re-checking in text books and history books. Ziggy is a professional military historian with dozens of books under his belt as author and many more as translator (into English). And I have a pretty good all-round general knowledge, and am strong in 20th C. military history.

There are three main interferences that face translators - linguistic, lexical and cultural. The first is to do with the differing structures of language - word order, grammar (Polish has four tenses, English has sixteen, for example). The second to do with the precise meaning of words and how those meanings vary across languages (Komisja can mean commission, but commission can also mean prowizja, which does not always mean provision. That's reserwa, which can also mean reserve). The third is to do with what the intended reader is reasonably (what's reasonably in Polish?) expected to know. Words like peerelowski or Wlasowiec need to be explained, not just translated. A translator needs awareness of these three interferences.

Ziggy and I spent two weekends going through the book on screen, checking facts and improving on our original translations; making the words flow more easily, tightening the sentences, before sending the text for setting. And this last weekend, we finally printed off the typeset page proofs, and read them aloud. Which is excellent exercise - it is good for you to read aloud! Good for the lungs and vocal chords, good for self-confidence and presentation skills. Reading page after page, a chapter (typically 20-30 pages long) at a time, for 16 hours (eight hours each) over two days, was gruelling.

It's only when you do this that you spot the natural patterns of linguistic flow. You find yourself reading aloud how the passage should sound, not how you've translated it. So you correct it - and then you find - hey! That's much better! Taking out or inserting commas; breaking up over-complex sentences, tweaking the word order, smoothing out the rhythm of the language. Any words which could possibly be construed as ambiguous are replaced by ones that the reader's brain can absorb without interruptive thoughts getting in the way.

So all in all, this exercise soaked up a lot of my time. Much, much more than the publishers have paid me for. I could have just handed in a first draft translation, collected the payment (I was paid for this job in April!) and walked away. But no. This is no longer a question of cash. It's about Polish history, it's about disseminating a gripping first-person wartime narrative to a potentially huge global English speaking readership - and it has to be perfect. Here the missionary kicks in and takes over from the mercenary. And so I've given up three weekends pro bono to help ensure that Silent and Unseen will be as good a read in English as it possibly can be. So that Stefan Bałuk's amazing testament - his escape from the Nazis and the Soviets in September 1939, his training by the SOE to be a parachute commando, master forger and insurgent leader, his part in the Warsaw Uprising and his subsequent imprisonment by Nazis and communists - can be as widely known as possible. Ensuring there are no mistakes denies ammunition for ideologically motivated falsifiers of history - "that's wrong - so therefore this is likely to be a mistake too".

Review of Byłem Cichociemnym Polish by Daniel Passent in Polityka.

* Csárdás, since you ask; the original Hungarian spelling is used in English. A csárdás will be played at the 14th Last Night of the Proms in Kraków, supported as ever by the BPCC and its members. I was checking the programme's translation.

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