You can forget how beautiful Quebec City is. And then you go back and it wraps itself around you: all that textured stone, the Plains of Abraham, the river, the tall European-looking buildings with shutters on the windows. Twenty-first century Canada isn’t, as a rule, much given to cobblestone. You come back and see it again and think: Wow. Wow, this is something. It was a terrific place for a conference I almost didn’t go to — already too many things to cram in to the week leading up to the Labour Day weekend. Glad I did. Here are some of the many (many, many) topics that came up.
How good do you want your translation to be?
When you translate a document that isn’t especially well-written, what do you do: reproduce it faithfully — vagueness, redundancies and all? The consensus is that, almost always, the answer is no. Just because the source text is unclear or repetitive doesn’t mean the translation should be correspondingly flawed. Unless there’s a compelling reason to maintain the weaknesses of a source text, the translation should be as good as it can be.
Frequency of use
Some words, expressions, and structures are used much more often in English than in French and vice versa. If I want my English translation of a French document to sound authentic, if I don’t want it to sound like a translation, I need to draw on the full range of English expression, not just what’s in the source document. For example, the French present tense has one form: je cours means I run/I do run/I am running. If I translate je cours each time as I run, my text is going to sound stilted and weird.
Deixis
We often use markers in English to situate ourselves in time and place. We use demonstratives (this, that, these, those) to show where people and things are in relation to ourselves. The French use proximal demonstratives (this/these) much more often than distals (that/those): the distal form in French is just the proximal form with an extra bit tacked on the end (ce livre-là). But because there are places in English where we naturally use that, we need to remember to use it in translation even if it’s not in the original, because translations into English need to reflect the way English speakers use English, not the way French speakers use French.
Many thanks to superb conference presenters Chris Durban, Grant Hamilton, David Jemielity, and Ros Schwartz for filling our brains with boisterous words and ideas.