Making the Impossible Possible
Posted in July 7th, 2009 by Rosiane OliveiraHello Friends! This post is not intended to define the translator but to share my personal impression on the profession.
I have been working with Ccaps for 3 months now and I am completely fascinated by translation. Until now, I had never realized that the role of a translator is not simply decoding text and staying true to its original meaning. On second thought, it makes for an almost impossible task to perform. To transpose the true meaning of the source language into the target language requires great care in order to achieve maximum textual equivalence.
While doing some research, I discovered that in the 19th century translation was something somewhat abstract, as we can see in the quote by Frey Luis de Leon: “He who translates should be faithful and exact, and if possible, count the words like so, no more and no less, of the same quality, condition and variety of meaning that the original has, without limitation to one’s own meaning and opinion.” Wow, pretty impersonal, don’t you think?
How fortunate that over the years we have constructed new ways to achieve the ideal translation, conceptualizing that the actual significance of the text is more than just the words themselves and are now searching to find the true intention of the author. Extra care should be given due to the evolution of words and their use in combination with a given context and cultural differences that can make varying interpretations of the same expression. If within the same language we have difficulty with neologisms and regional differences, imagine how complex it can get between two entirely different languages!
Simple words like “saudade” (a strong sense of nostalgia) that don’t have an exact correspondent in English become an immense challenge for even good translators, who need to translate the word while staying true to the meaning of the author. For me this seems to be an almost impossible task…
The perfect equivalent is something difficult to achieve, meaning that translators have many challenges ahead with the difficult task of making the impossible possible, and doing so with pleasure.
In light of these “minor” discoveries, congratulations to all of you translators for your daily magical transformation of words!
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