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Happy International Translation Day to translators and interpreters around the world!
With every job, we bring people more of what they need or want across boundaries of language and culture. Be proud of yourselves, and have a fantastic day!
To learn more, see the International Federation of Translators ITD page: https://en.fit-ift.org/international-translation-day/
Welcome! This pinned post is where you can find links to my COVID-19 playlists.
Read on to learn about the playlist initiative and what you’ll find in each list, or boldly click on one of these quick links to start listening.
Sacred #SongsOfComfort: YouTube | Sacred #SongsOfComfort: Spotify | Secular #SongsOfComfort: YouTube
Here in the United States, we’re talking about another mass shooting.
It doesn’t matter what day you read this post on; that opening sentence will still be true. We have a lot of them here. We talk about them a lot. We typically don’t do anything beyond talking, but that part may change one day.
That day probably isn’t today. Today we’re still talking. And I’m a translator, so I’m meta. I want to talk about the conversation.
The specific mass shooting we’re talking about today was an act of racially motivated terrorism committed by a white supremacist man. That’s not unusual, either. Racially motivated violence has been a specialty of ours since back when we were still a British colony, and white supremacy is on the rise, here and around the globe.
The national conversation about it has managed to hit on the usual questions: Should we officially agree that people of color have the same human rights as white people? Should we officially agree that women have the same human rights as men? Should we officially agree that immigrants have the same human rights as current US citizens?
You might not have heard those questions phrased exactly that way. Don’t worry; I’m a translator. Let me translate them into some other forms: Are white supremacists “terrorists,” or are they just “misguided”? Should we address the fact that most mass shooters are men with a history of violence against women, or would mentioning that be hurtful to the men who never shoot anybody? When people talk about mass shootings, are they really just distracting us from the more pressing immigration crisis?
Those are the questions I hear all around me.
As far as I can tell, what it all boils down to is this: We each have a circle in our mind where we put all the people whom we think should have human rights.
Whether by nature or nurture, some people’s circles seem to be bigger than others. Still, we all have to decide for ourselves which human beings should get human rights. So we either have to move people into the circle or draw the circle around the people.
All of those questions above definitely make the conversation about which people get to move into the circle.
In this conversation we’re having about gun violence (or is it about race? or is it about gender? or is it about nationality?), it seems implied that since all of us have finite circles, we need to decide for ourselves how best to fit people in there. Maybe we go with the “first come, first served” rule until the circle is full. Maybe we say people of a certain skin color get priority entry. Maybe we say cisgender people get priority entry. Maybe we say people whose families came to the United States during a certain date range get priority entry. Maybe everybody gets rated on some complex system of sexual attractiveness, educational level, reading speed, and physical fitness.
But whatever the system, whatever size the circle, eventually this happens…
The circle is looking pretty full. It doesn’t look like there’s room for that last person. Maybe they were the “brownest one,” or the “fattest one,” or the “slowest one,” or just the unluckiest one. For whatever reason, not everybody fit in the circle!
But wait.
Human rights don’t take up space.
I imagined this circle. This is all conceptual. This is me, introspecting about how big the “Who gets human rights?” circle is. This my neighbor, introspecting about the same thing.
Every time we wonder if a white supremacist is a terrorist in the same way a member of ISIS is, or question whether it’s “fair” to talk about how abusive men commit most mass shootings, or mention immigration and mass shootings at the same time like they are inherently connected issues, that’s us deciding that we don’t want everybody in the circle. That’s us deciding that human rights aren’t “human rights”; they’re rights we grant only to specific humans.
Because if we did want everybody in this imaginary circle…
We’d just imagine a bigger circle.
My vision is the “draw the circle around the people” one. Everybody is inside the circle by default. If someone looks like they might fall outside the circle, well, I control my vision, and I can choose to expand the circle. I might not like that person, but me choosing to exclude them would always be a choice, and never a necessity.
Your vision of humanity is your imagination at work.
The size of your circle is the size of your imagination.
And any failure to grant human rights to every single human being is a failure of imagination.
Watching artists over a long arc of years reveals a lot of interesting things: What changes, what stays the same. What you thought were their strengths, what their strengths turn out to be.
James Galway was one of my favorite flutists growing up. My aunt bought me his CDs and at least one book about him. Like so many, I liked the twinkle in his eye. The way he was more accessible to the viewer than Jean-Pierre Rampal; the way both of them made it look easy, but Galway made it look like he was having fun. I once called him a “jolly elf.”
As an adult, I went to see him perform live with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. My significant other at the time was mystified by my “jolly elf” characterization, because by then he was no longer young. The twinkle in his eye was still firmly in place, but much of the bounce was gone. And yet, I was truly touched by this performance. Continue Reading →
*Note: The views expressed in this essay are the author’s alone, and should not be taken to represent the views of any current or former employers.
When I read Uma Thurman’s stories of abuse and betrayal at the hands of the men who were supposed to be her collaborators, I couldn’t help but write about it. Something about the context of experiencing these terrible things while she was working on Kill Bill, one of the most violent cinematic environments possible (even if she and her stunt double were often the ones instigating the violence), struck a familiar chord with me.
I work in the entertainment industry, translating films and TV shows. I translate mostly TV, but I love film. Film is my greater love, and it’s where I wish I spent more of my time. But I’ll tell you something: Despite my profession, in my private life, that love died for a long time. I stopped watching films for years.
It wasn’t “despite” my profession. It was because of my profession.
I’ve never been sexually assaulted or put in extreme physical danger in the name of film, like Thurman and so very many of her colleagues. I don’t claim the #MeToo hashtag for myself, because it belongs to those who have experienced things I haven’t. But the juxtaposition of “my day job” with “horrific sexual violence” is familiar to me. I think it’s probably familiar to far more people than those outside the industry might imagine.
That’s why today, I want to talk about the entertainment industry. Not because it’s the only industry that is home to male sexual predators—it isn’t. Not because the suffering of entertainers matters more than other people’s suffering—it doesn’t. Not even because this is the worst of work environments for a language professional—that’s not true, either. (I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a court interpreter, hearing and relating the stories of crime victims.) But because it’s a work environment that’s not easy for many people to understand, and that’s something I can help with.
So, here are some thoughts on being a woman in the entertainment world.
On March 2nd, 2017, I decided to be wrong.
More concretely, I decided to give up being right for Lent. I was motivated by several different things, both abstract and pragmatic. There was my frustration with what I see as a potentially fatal barrier to productive discourse in American society today—widespread self-righteousness—and my desire to change it. There was my interest in how philosophical concepts like self-doubt and self-righteousness interact with religion. And there was my identity as a translator.
Wait, you may be thinking, what does being a translator have to do with any of this?
Well, I’m glad you asked! This is a translation blog, after all. And my view is that a healthy, consciously wielded self-doubt sits squarely at the heart of the translator’s best practices.
Less than a year after I turned translation from my hobby into my profession, I was put in charge of reviewing other anime translators’ work. I was so young—just 23!—and so unestablished that this was a pretty shocking development. I mean, I knew translation was the career for me, but I didn’t think I’d already achieved unparalleled genius in the field or anything. I’m sure that if any of the people whose work I was correcting back then learned my age, they were quite shocked too, if not actively offended.
As it turned out, the fact that I didn’t think I’d achieved genius is exactly what made me a good reviewer. In the beginning, when I looked at a translation of anything more complex than sentences like “Please” and “Thank you,” I’d try to verify, because I didn’t trust my own authority over the other translators’ in any inherent way. I looked up words. I looked up all the words, including the words I already knew. I reread my grammar books to make sure I wasn’t misremembering obscure usages. I asked my mentor when I wasn’t sure I’d figured something out correctly. And I rapidly discovered that this is exactly what the people whose work I reviewed weren’t doing, and therefore the work was riddled with errors. And so I learned that the self-doubt I felt wasn’t just “beginner’s jitters” that more time in the career should alleviate. Instead, it was the most powerful tool a translator can have at her disposal. When we know how easily we can be wrong, we take the steps to try to be less wrong. It might take a few days of bravery to really internalize that you’re constantly teetering on the edge of wrongness, but once you get there, it’s not only empowering: it’s an enormous relief.
You can’t be both a good translator and a self-righteous translator. It’s just not a thing.
Human fallibility, on the other hand, is definitely a thing.
So in the last couple of years, as I’ve seen self-righteousness overcome more and more of society in our religious, political, and social conversations and realized how little we are willing to listen to each other from that place of “healthy, consciously wielded self-doubt” so that we can truly understand and solve problems, the more I’ve thought that this wrongness principle should apply outside of translation. It should apply to our lives across the board: humans are fallible, which means we could be wrong in our convictions at any time. My premise, then, at the beginning of my Lenten experiment was, “You can’t really see the truth about anything until you acknowledge that you might not have looked at it properly yet.”
self-righteous. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved May 5, 2017 from Dictionary.com website http://www.dictionary.com/browse/self-righteous
Since I want to see everyone practice this, I started by trying to practice it myself. I wrote several friends-only follow-ups on Facebook throughout Lent, and promised to write up my notes on the whole experience at the end… which is what I’m doing now.
So, how did it go and what did I learn?
Another FAQ!
Much as I love my alma mater, the question “Did your Bryn Mawr education prepare you for your career?” is, I think, actually a bigger one: “Did your liberal arts education prepare you for your career?” Because Bryn Mawr is a liberal arts school, and I think the practical usefulness of the liberal arts is what people are really getting at here.
The short answer: yep, it did.
The long answer: Here’s what a liberal arts education is, and why it’s useful to a translator’s career even though it’s by definition not career-specific.
I’ve read a lot of excellent posts from my fellow freelancers talking about setting boundaries with clients: establishing what type of deadline is okay and what price you’re willing to work for, or even establishing when you will be available via email throughout the day (I could swear I remember Corinne McKay giving that advice, but I can’t find it just now, so apologies if I am misattributing!). Like most of us, I sometimes have trouble saying “no” to either the client or myself, so it’s always great advice to hear.
I’d add one more type of boundary that’s helpful for freelancers: boundaries concerning the source content. I recently set a boundary with a prospective agency client that felt really good to me. The agency contact and I talked price and workload, and it was all going very smoothly, but he mentioned that sometimes his company was pitched content with “adult themes.”
Now, all of you who’ve been in the entertainment biz in the US–and also most of you who haven’t–know that the phrase “adult themes” is code for “nudity and/or sexual content.” Most of us TV/film staff have worked with it on and off since day one, and it’s just part of the job. But there is one variation on this theme that I am extremely uncomfortable with, and that’s the sexualization of children. I decided to be very upfront and honest with my new client and simply say that while I’m happy to work on most projects, I may not be able to accept a job if it sexualizes children.
Of course the client understood my position perfectly! There really aren’t many people who don’t understand that particular discomfort, so it’s certainly not a conversation to be afraid of. But all the same, sometimes in my first conversation with a prospective client, I feel hesitant to bring up content-related concerns that might not be immediately relevant. So for anyone out there who also hesitates to set content-related boundaries early, I just want you to know that coming to this understanding so quickly put a smile on my face for the rest of the morning. I highly recommend it!
Encouraging food for thought:
One last thing–It’s good to keep in mind that when any project manager offers you a job with uncomfortable content (while of course you’re not psychic and you don’t know what they’re thinking), there’s a good chance that they are uncomfortable about it too. The difference is that unlike you, they may not be allowed to tell you how uncomfortable they feel about the content. Frankly, they may not even know what the content actually is–maybe this sounds incredible, but it’s true! Project managers don’t have time to watch every single piece of content they assign before translation, so there will usually be at least a few scenes in the middle of things that they have never seen, and if it’s a TV show, obviously they can’t watch the episodes that haven’t been made yet. So if they assign you something that crosses one of your boundaries, maybe they’re trying to test those boundaries, but it is just as likely that aren’t trying to test you at all–they just didn’t realize that content was there!
So, try not to fall into the trap of assuming things about either their position or how they might feel about your position. Just say what you need to say as professionally, calmly, and non-judgmentally as possible.
And finally, try not to be too judgmental of yourself, either. If you accept a project and then it turns into something other than what you thought it was, that happens. It really does happen to everyone. You may decide that you started the project and you’ll see it through to the end, even though if you’d known what it was up front you would have said no. Maybe you’ll find yourself evaluating what to do based on whether the line crossed is a moral one or a “this is creepy and I don’t like it” one, and ask to stop the project if it’s a moral line. Maybe you’ll realize it’s your own fault that you’re in this mess–you didn’t fully evaluate the project before agreeing to it–and therefore you’re obligated to finish it no matter what. Maybe you’ll realize there’s no way you could have known. Maybe your contract is such that it doesn’t matter either way; you simply have to finish it. Every person and project are different, but as you’re working out what to do next, remember: you didn’t know. You didn’t sit down one day and think, “Today, I will sexualize children [or whatever].” That is not the decision you made, so don’t blame yourself for it. Just do what you have to do with this project, and then use what you’ve learned to handle these issues better next time.
I’m slammed by so many work emergencies these days I haven’t had time to write too much for myself, but here a couple of quick little thoughts about the uses of literature in translation and in the world to follow up on What Good Is Literature?:
Every so often people ask me whether a liberal arts education really prepared me for my career. The short answer is, yes. The longer answer is, yes, and without a strong literary and liberal arts background, my translations of TV shows and films would be not only inferior to what I can do now, but just plain sub-standard. You can’t afford to miss the explicit literary references made in films, and those notes usually aren’t in the script–you just have to have to know them, or have enough ear for literature to recognize a quote even if you don’t know it. A random sampling of spontaneous quotes I’ve encountered in anime:
I’m a devotee of the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, and in the various biographies of important historical figures, I’ve noticed a theme. For the women in the 1600s through the early 1900s, times when women of all classes were often barred from the same education men got, there was one sentence that popped up over and over in the biographies of women who revolutionized their fields of poetry, science, human rights, et cetera: “Her father gave her full access to his library.”
Sometimes, of course, it was the library of a brother, a family friend, or some other figure. And as often as not, these women’s fathers still didn’t allow them to pursue an “unwomanly” formal education–but they were allowed to read what they liked. And then they changed the world.
Something to think about!
Today, one of my advanced and highly motivated students embarked with me on his first foray into Japanese literature: we started reading the short story 「神様」 (“Kamisama,” or “God”), by Hiromi Kawakami. It’s the second time I’ve taught this story, which features a walk to the river with a delightfully polite bear.
It was hard work for him, of course, and it introduced a lot of new grammar his formal textbooks hadn’t covered. This particular student prefers non-fiction to fiction in English, so I’d warned him ahead of time that he might find it frustrating, but over a three-week holiday break he got through the first page just fine. I thought things were going pretty well until he said, “I don’t see how this is helping me speak Japanese.”
I was flabbergasted for a moment. In my head I heard the question, What good is literature? But I’ve always been a voracious reader of fiction—it’s never occurred to me to question literature’s usefulness. For me, and for many of my friends, being able to read foreign literature is one of the goals of learning a language. But today, for the first time, I personally witnessed the proof of the theory that you don’t need to care about literature to be passionate about learning a language.
In which case, what good is literature, to the language learner whose interests lie elsewhere?
My answer to my student was that studying this story would help his listening comprehension by introducing him to speech that people use in conversation or on TV, and he’ll now notice them using it and know what it’s doing. And I 100% believe that’s true. I also believe that literature, along with comic books and television, tells you how people actually speak in a way that textbooks don’t. But now that I’m not on the spot anymore, I think there’s more to it than that.
Literature is also good for us so that we don’t fall into ruts. When you’re speaking a language you didn’t learn as a child, it’s dreadfully easy to find yourself recycling the same limited phrases or constructions over and over. Even I find myself sometimes latching on to phrases and developing speech tics I have to force myself to shake off. You see, it’s easy to only use a small portion of what you actually know. To become repetitive, because (1) learning takes repeated practice, and (2) traditional textbooks won’t expose you to anything outside the box.
Fiction is usually where we find the most creative use of language, where authors actively try to put words together in provocative ways. I submit that whatever your level of enjoyment, literature can’t help but expose you to new patterns and new expressions. And so I think that literature can help us go beyond functional into articulate.
What do you think? Have stories been useful to you?
**Yes, in addition to my full-time and freelance translating, I also tutor in the Japanese language. It’s pretty fun. Feel absolutely free to question my work/life balance skills, though.