Slavic Languages Division (American Translators Association)
In this latest episode of the SLD podcast, Elana Pick and Yuliya Tsaplina talk about the importance of professional interpreter training and the future of the profession. Both guests teach at the Master of Conference Interpreting program (MCI) at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Canada.
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Review by Tyler Langendorfer
Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash
Last month at the ATA’s 58th Annual Conference in DC, John Di Rico presented the session “Selling Your Translation and Interpreting Services,” a talk focused on the techniques required to successfully acquire and retain direct clients. Di Rico, a French-to-English translator as well as Sales and Marketing Manager for WordFast, advocated a “customer-centric” approach that encouraged sellers to rethink their own views on the buyer-seller relationship.
Di Rico began his talk with a sample email from a prospective buyer and asked audience members to form groups in order to discuss how they might respond. After each group shared their ideas, Di Rico would outline his recommendations, then ask the groups to again brainstorm solutions to another series of questions. During the initial rounds of discussion, Di Rico drew attention to the most important details a seller ought to obtain initially: the name, title and company of the prospective client; how they found out about the seller; the buyer’s present goal; and the challenges they have with their current process. Once these have been identified, the seller can move on to the next step and compose a champion letter for the potential client.
A champion letter is perhaps the most important communication effort in the buyer-seller relationship, as it underscores why the buyer should choose the seller’s services. It also demonstrates a strong degree of professionalism and courtesy. According to Di Rico, it has five parts: a statement of goals (or shared goals), a summary of the current situation and the capabilities required to address it, at least one potential benefit from the seller’s services, and the next steps should the buyer maintain their interest.
Other advice of note included Di Rico’s statement that sales is a conversation, one that requires patience and a strong willingness to find solutions for the buyer. Also, to build a strong, personable relationship with a buyer early on, Di Rico advised that the seller try to schedule a phone call in their first email response. Lastly, the seller should not invest too much time in obtaining a client that is uncooperative in providing the info needed to conduct their business.
For this writer, Di Rico’s approach seemed reasonable and well worth considering. Although not all his recommendations may have been new to session attendees, it was beneficial to closely examine the techniques sellers utilize when they interact with prospective buyers. Perhaps the most salient takeaway was Di Rico’s emphasis on making sure that the seller understands the buyer’s needs and that they work with them to reach a solution. Even with the focus on direct clients, translators and interpreters can nonetheless incorporate Di Rico’s recommendations into their relationship with agencies, as they could also benefit from a heightened sensitivity to a project manager’s needs. Furthermore, customer-centric selling enables the seller to rethink the value of their services and may provide for a renewed sense of purpose in their professional goals. In other words, what does it mean to translate or interpret, for the sellers themselves, the buyers, and perhaps also the greater social good.
Tyler Langendorfer (tyler@aegistranslations.com) is a translator of German and Spanish specializing in marketing, social sciences, and humanities translation. He is a participant in the ATA Mentoring Program and has been studying Russian independently since 2014.
This material first appeared as a guest post on the NOTIS blog at https://www.notisnet.org/Blog/5012686. Published with permission and additions from the author.
By Viktor Slepovitch, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Department Chair, Department of Business English, Belarus State Economic University (Minsk, Belarus)
Introduction
In the process of reading a translated text in this or that specific area of studies, one normally does not focus on the fact that the text being read is a translation. The reader’s attention is in fact drawn to the subject-matter of the text. What might possibly make us aware that we are dealing with a translation is a multitude of translation faux pas. The best way to avoid them is to adequately understand the situational subject-matter and the context, which in fact is an essential part of a translator’s competency and professionalism.
Situational subject-matter includes the persons, objects and phenomena found in the text, as well as the relationships between them. According to translation and interpretation scholar E. Breus, the same extralinguistic situation can be perceived and described differently in different languages. [1] Clearly, without situational subject-matter awareness, a translator is not able to produce an adequate translation and fully convey the message meant by the author in the source language.
Research findings
The situational subject-matter awareness is vital for understanding what the original text is about. To illustrate this statement, the following examples are quite appropriate:
ENGLISH – RUSSIAN: Why is it that smokers always head out coatless, no matter what the weather? (Head out – выходят из здания на улицу = are leaving the building rather than стремятся выйти or направляются = are trying to leave or are headed for.) [2]
RUSSIAN – ENGLISH: Библиотечный фонд университета составляет полтора миллиона экземпляров книг. (Библиотечный фонд is not the library fund, which would be a word-for-word translation, but the number of books held.) [3]
Without situational subject-matter awareness, the wrong translation is unavoidable. In a TV program about rock musicians of the 1980s who arranged concerts for charity, it was said that the musicians called themselves representatives of the Band Aid generation. According to Wikipedia, the term originated from a charity super-group featuring mainly British and Irish musicians founded in 1984 to raise money for anti-famine efforts in Ethiopia by releasing the song “Do they know it’s Christmas?”.
The translation of this phrase into Russian came out as поколение групповой помощи (literally “the generation of group assistance”), which was not correct. The word Band-Aid (originally meaning a brand of an adhesive bandage) was split into two words by the translator: band (a musical group, as in jazz band) and aid (assistance).
The context, however, made it clear that the rock musicians considered it their mission to provide emergency aid for the needy—just like a Band-Aid is used for emergency purposes, e.g., when a person accidentally cuts his/her finger. The translator should have used a metaphorical expression, but the major challenge was to understand the situational subject-matter for the purpose of conveying the meaning in Russian.
The context is what makes it easier to understand the situational subject-matter and produce the correct translation, taking into account what and how they say/write in this or that situation in the target (Russian) language.
That said, a translator should not overdo it by trying to produce a special effect in the process of translation. The following example seems to be a good illustration of this statement.
In May 1995, an American was interpreting during the meeting between Clinton and Yeltsin in the USA. Russia’s President sarcastically said, “Вот вы, журналисты, предрекали провал. На самом деле это вы провалились”. This is what the interpreter said: “You, journalists, said it would be a disaster. In fact, you are a disaster.” (Clinton is laughing.)
Perhaps in that situation it would have been more appropriate to use the verb to fail: “You journalists predicted failure. In fact, it’s you who have failed.” The word disaster was too strong, and was surely a case of the interpreter “overdoing” the interpretation. [4]
Summarizing the reasons for failing to understand the situational subject-matter of an utterance, it is possible to identify the following ones:
Conclusion
All the above means that situational subject-matter awareness — as an important translation issue — should be considered as an indispensable skill in translation and interpretation, alongside with such skills as:
References
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