Segments in – segments out, or can translations sound natural?

What are essential attributes of a successful translation project?

Anyone would mention client instructions, TM and glossary. The quality and success of a project is often measured as the degree to which those three were adhered. And indeed translators like when the TM is clean and the glossary is unambiguous, and they totally love when client instructions say: your translation should read as if it was originally written in your language. We are all artists, and we do appreciate when customers want us to show how good we are in our native language.

So, we enthusiastically launch our TM tool and start translating as if we’re copywriting the text anew in our native language. Nice picture, everyone’s happy.

I recently was asked to review a short translation. The client style guide was neat and short (does anyone like long style guides?) and said that the readers should not notice that the text is a translation. The instructions from the project manager were also pretty clear: please correct grammar and syntax errors, please don’t do any stylistic or preferential changes and make sure the translator followed the style guide and the glossary etc.

And the translation was good. It didn’t have any grammar or syntax errors, it followed the glossary, it was really a good piece of work. Except for one small thing. It didn’t follow the style guide. Anyone could tell a mile off that it was a translation. No Russian speaker would write it like this if only she or he would write in Russian from the very beginning.

Needless to say, the client wanted some particular examples of this “non-natural flow” to discuss them with the translator, and in the attempt to collect some I realized there is nothing to pass to the translator, and it is not an issue of this particular project at all. It’s just that a translation as it is being done now can never sound natural.

Look at what we use every day: translation memory, translation tools, machine translation… What we’re doing is always a translation. Period. All we’re left to do now is forget the sweet dreams about natural flow. As long as translators are in a segmented view of a translation tool they think in segments, too, and the text will always be a translation. That’s it. No matter how good we are as translators, as long as we translate segments we get segments. Original text was first written and then segmented, that’s the difference. If we take a picture, cut it into pieces, copy each piece and then glue them together we'll never get a picture as if it was originally painted as a whole. Lines will be cut.

Even if our client is extremely loyal and lets us change anything from 100% percent matches to text segmenting, we’re still in the translation environment and all we can produce is a translation. And it is not that bad in many cases. But whether this is good or bad is another story, and this one was just about unachievable “natural flow”.