O que não me parece tão natural é
a transformação com base no objeto da
ação, por exemplo, como ocorre com a palavra
“gown” (avental). No trecho
“the associate shall gown” (o assistente
colocará o avental) não significa que
o funcionário realmente colocará o avental,
mas sim a vestimenta higienizada e os acessórios
necessários. Nos documentos que traduzi, o verbo
substituía a expressão “don
the gown” (colocar o avental), na qual um
verbo arcaico é mantido. Embora desconcertante
no início, era justificável. O que realmente
me transtornou foi esta instrução:
“If there is no data, NA it” (Na ausência
de dados, basta NDá-lo). O objetivo era a pessoa
escrever NA (do inglês, Not
Available, traduzido como “Não
Disponível”) no espaço
destinado aos dados. O objeto da ação
tornou-se o nome da própria ação,
como no caso de “gown”.
Em
todo caso, essas conversões são de uso
constante no inglês, podendo ou não ser
traduzidas diretamente. Talvez seja necessário
determinar o que o instrumento faz, em que consiste
o processo ou o que deve ser feito ao objeto; ou seja,
tudo o que foi mascarado na conversão da categoria
do termo. Pode ser que, em vez de distribuir com a pipeta,
haja aspiração com a pipeta, por exemplo.
O Translation Journal publicou recentemente um artigo
online de grande utilidade elaborado pelos tradutores
Hernandez e Cabrera sobre esse assunto, disponível
no site da Accurapid (http://accurapid.com/journal/31conversion.htm).
Outro
uso que se tornou comum é a colocação
de barra (/) entre duas palavras. A tendência
pode ter se iniciado com o uso de “and/or”
(e/ou), que é quase universalmente condenado.
Não há tradução para “and/or”
porque se trata de uma expressão de significado
insondável. O termo visa à concisão,
ainda que em frases como “quality degradation
and/or bioburden contamination” (degradação
da qualidade e/ou contaminação por materiais
biológicos) o “or” somente
já seria suficiente. Parece-me que parte do problema
da expressão “and/or” é
que a relação entre os elementos é
realmente de natureza hierárquica, no qual um
elemento poderia ser um exemplo de outro. Se houver
contaminação por materiais biológicos,
por definição, há degradação
da qualidade. O que o escritor pretendia dizer era “degradação
da qualidade como, por exemplo, por contaminação
por materiais biológicos” e não
“degradação da qualidade ou contaminação
por materiais biológicos ou ambos”, a versão
longa de uma frase com “e/ou”.
Como
exemplo de outro campo, apresento este trecho de um
documento da Organização Mundial de Comércio:
|
Aside
from the obvious vocabulary changes due to the emergence
of an extraordinary array of new objects and processes,
whether in daily life (satellite TV in remote parts
of China) or highly specialized situations (biotechnology
bots of various sorts), English is undergoing changes
in usage that I believe are the true headache for a
translator. It is usually possible to discover the meaning
of an unusual word by finding either glossary definitions
or clear context on the billions of Web sites that have
been made accessible by search engines, not to mention
the age-old method of talking to the author. Usage,
on the other hand, is a more slippery matter, so slippery
that even when the translator has access to the author
of a document, the result of a consultation may not
yield a translatable unit like a definition.
What
I would like to discuss are some specific instances
of usage that I have come across in translating standard
operating procedure documents in the pharmaceutical
industry that gave me pause. I translate primarily into
Spanish, but I will not be proposing any translation
solutions here for any particular language. What I am
addressing are what I feel to be difficulties in parsing
English, a task that is independent of the ultimate
target language. Specifically, I am going to address
three kinds of usage that I have found to be prevalent
and troublesome: conversion of the part of speech, a
virgule placed between two words and the ellipsis.
Perhaps
the part of speech conversion that is most commented
on is verbalization, noun-to-verb conversion, also called
“verbing” (an example itself of the phenomenon).
We find that things are to be centrifuged, autoclaved,
pipetted, chromatographed or filtered. All of these
are verbs that originated in nouns describing an instrument
or a process, and the only one not usually found as
a verb in common dictionaries is autoclave. Verbalizations
of this kind seem natural to me, a transformation of
the instrument or process into a verb makes language
more concise, making it unnecessary to say “process
in the centrifuge,” “sterilize in the autoclave,”
“dispense with the pipette,” “analyze
using chromatography,” or “pass through
a filter.”
[Inserir
Jones_BReEN.jpg.]
[LEGENDA: I centrifuge; you centrifuge; they centrifuge]
What
does not seem quite as natural is a transformation based
on the object of the action, for example with the word
“gown.” “The associate shall gown”
does not mean that the worker will put on an actual
gown, but that the worker will put on the required sanitary
clothing and accessories. In the documents I handled,
the verb replaced the phrase “don the gown,”
in which an archaic verb would have persisted. While
disconcerting at first, it was understandable. What
stumped me was this instruction: “If there is
no data, NA it.” As it turned out, the idea was
for the person to write NA (N/A or Not Applicable) in
the space provided for writing the data. The object
of the action became the name of the action itself,
as with the gown.
In
any case, these conversions are constantly used in English
and may or may not be directly translatable. It may
be necessary to determine what the instrument does,
what the process consists of, or what must be done to
the object, all of which have been masked in the conversion
of the part of speech. It could be that rather than
dispensing with the pipette there is aspiration with
the pipette, for example. The on-line Translation Journal
recently published a useful article by translators Hernandez
and Cabrera on this topic, available at the Accurapid
Web site, http://accurapid.com/journal/31conversion.htm.
Another
usage that has become prevalent is placing a virgule,
perhaps better known as a slash (/), between two words.
The trend may have started with the usage “and/or,”
which is almost universally condemned. There is no translation
for “and/or” because it is a term of unfathomable
meaning. The term “and/or” purports to achieve
concision, yet in phrases such as “quality degradation
and/or bioburden contamination” just “or”
is sufficient. It seems to me that part of the issue
in “and/or” phrases is that the relationship
between the elements is really of a hierarchical nature
in which one element could be an example of another.
If there is bioburden contamination, by definition there
is quality degradation. What the writer meant was “quality
degradation, as for example, by bioburden contamination,”
not “quality degradation or bioburden contamination
or both,” which is the long version of an “and/or”
phrase.
As
evidence from another field, I offer this from a World
Trade Organization Document:
3.
Interpretation of “and/or”
7.81 The interpretations of the parties are also in
a sharp contrast with each other regarding the meaning
of “and/or” in Article 6.2. As noted above,
according to Pakistan, a subject domestic industry consists
of producers of (i) like products, or (ii) directly
competitive products, or (iii) both like products and
directly competitive products. In contrast, the United
States argued that Members are permitted to identify
a “domestic industry” as an industry producing
a product that is: (i) like but not directly competitive;
or (ii) unlike but directly competitive; or (iii) both
like and directly competitive. -WT/DS192/R, 31 May 2001(01-2567).
Due to space restrictions, I will limit the discussion
to the paragraph above extracted from the WTO website
on the interpretation of “and/or.” The consequences
of the lack of meaning of “and/or” in this
case affected an important part of world trade, the
cotton trade.
Then
there is the usage in a situation of elements that are
not subsets of each other, as in the instruction “place
on a table and/or rack.” Here the issue is really
of a physical impossibility: you cannot place the same
object on a table and a rack at the same time. I could
give many more examples, but what I am trying to emphasize
is that the translator is faced with a real problem,
not just a stylistic quibble, as some would like to
classify the “and/or problem.” That there
are millions of examples of “and/or” being
used does not mean that the users are being clear.
The
usage of the slash has spilled over to its acceptance
in countless formations like “manager/supervisor,”
“purchaser/planner,” “cleaning/sanitizing,”
“transcription/translation.” The slash cannot
be used to indicate only one relationship between the
two words:
manager/supervisor
= manager or supervisor
purchaser/planner = purchaser-planner
cleaning/sanitizing = cleaning and sanitizing OR cleaning
or sanitizing,
depending on the context…
However,
in the case of “transcription/translation,”
with reference to biotechnology, it may be that we will
see transcription/translation as a fixed form, or a
lexicalization, the virgule having become the contemporary
version of the hyphen in the creation of compound terms.
There may be a certain carryover effect from seeing
so many virgules in computer addresses and other computer-associated
uses. Whatever the origin, this is one more reason to
reach for the aspirin.
For
further reading on the virgule, I recommend “Slash
the Slash,” by Stephen deLooze at the European
Medical Writers Association Web site and “Use
of the Solidus between Words, Symbols and Abbreviations,”
(no author shown) at the American Physical Society website.
I have found that trying to understand why and how the
slash is used so much has helped me better understand
the text I am translating, and these two articles are
quite useful references on this subject.
The
final kind of nail I feel driving into my skull is the
nail of ellipsis. In the phrase, “line to permeate,”
where is the article to tell me that “permeate”
is a noun and not a verb? How should I know that a “pre-integrity
test” is a test of integrity before a given process
or step? And an “aseptic fill,” which is
not filling anything? Rather, is it a test performed
to verify that the aseptic level has been maintained?
Would you want to generate a nonconformance? Of course
not! You want to generate a nonconformance report. A
“temperature EN” was explained to me as
a device with an Equipment Number that is used to measure
temperature. And the engineer triumphantly informed
me that “temperature is not a noun!” Another
example:
An
HPLC injection valve is placed in-line between the tee
and the column for sample introduction... The flow through
the column is changed by adjusting the length of the
restriction capillary or by varying the flow rate from
the HPLC slightly.
HPLC
is High Pressure Liquid Chromatography. How can there
be something from the High Pressure Liquid Chromatography?
Obviously, it is from the HPLC system, valve or device.
I
could continue, but my purpose here is to assure my
colleagues, who will forever be accused of treason,
that English is like any other language: a language
in constant change, whose users will do what they please,
stylebooks and scolding editors notwithstanding. Translators
of non-fiction documents, if lucky, will have access
to people who will be able to clarify texts that have
hard to crack nuts like those I have mentioned. I hope
that these comments will be useful to those who face
these issues in their work.
Anne Jones has lived in Puerto Rico since 1953. The
author has worked extensively with legal and manufacturing
texts, notably in the pharmaceutical area, as a freelancer
and principal of Sygnos Translations, although she would
like to make a living translating the poetry of Hjalmar
Flax.
[OLHO: That there are millions of examples of “and/or”
being used does not mean that the users are being clear.]
|
