Translation Issues

I have been involved in some translation activity recently and I got very interested in such issue in the translation process as REQUIREMENTS OF THE CUSTOMER. Does the translator have to take into consideration the requirements of the customer if they sometimes interfere with the QUALITY of translation.

The problem is that we (the customer and the translator) being on different sides of the fence, have a different vision as to the quality of the translated material. Why? Because what the customer often means by the quality translated stuff is the stuff translated WORD FOR WORD – the stuff where there is place for grammar transformations, add-ons and omissions of words – all those things which, if justified by the necessity, make the translation adequate to the target language doing no harm to the grounds of the translated materials which is SENSE. The translator in his/her turn (and this is what future translators are taught at Universities) considers that quality translated materials are the materials which bear no sense lapses and are ADEQUATE to the norms and rules of the target language. The translated material should sound nice rather than clumsy and weird. What is the target audience of the translated material? Who will read the translated stuff? Most evidently, native speakers of the language towards which the translation has been done. Will a native speaker want to read clumsy sentences and word phrases which sound more than strange for his/her native speaker’s ear? At this, the translator should not beautify the stuff he or she translates. If this or that structure is quite applicable in the target language though not very nice from the point of view of style and it could have been said better, the translator should use the same structure as the creator of the text (ONLY if it is possible from the point of view of the norms and rules of the target language).

Now, how can we prove to the customer that the stuff we translated is quality – even though we used some transformations and implemented necessary changes to make the translation copy conform to the norms of the target language? First of all, if the customer sees that the quantity of words in the original copy does not coincide with the quantity of words in the translated copy – this can bring doubts into their minds. It is true that languages have fewer set-phrases which could replace a descriptive notion than other languages. As a consequence, texts translated on some languages have more words than the original. For example, English and Russian: original English texts are always shorter than their translated equivalents.