Enjoyment

One would think that burnout rates would be high among translators. The job is not only underpaid and undervalued by society; it involves long hours spent alone with uninspiring texts working under the stress of short deadlines. One would think, in fact, that most translators would burn out on the job after about three weeks.

And maybe some do. The examples of freelance translators who remain content in their jobs after thirty years, says something about the operation of the greatest motivator of all: they enjoy their work. Not the fame and fortune; not the immortal brilliance of the texts they translate. Somehow they find a sustaining pleasure in the work itself.

Not all translators enjoy every aspect of the work; fortunately, the field is diverse enough to allow individuals to minimize their displeasure. Some translators dislike dealing with clients, and so tend to gravitate toward work with agencies, which are staffed by other translators who understand the difficulties translators face. Some translators go stir–crazy all alone at home, and long for adult company; they tend to get in–house jobs, in translation divisions of large corporations or translation agencies or elsewhere, so that they are surrounded by other people, who help relieve the tedium with social interaction. Some translators get tired of translating all day; they take breaks to write poetry, or go for a swim, or find other sources of income to pursue every third hour of the day, or every other day of the week. Some translators get tired of the repetitiveness of their jobs, translating the same kind of text day in, day out; they develop other areas of specialization, actively seek out different kinds of texts, perhaps try their hand at translating poetry or drama.

Still, no matter how one diversifies one's professional life, translating (like most jobs) involves a good deal of repetitive drudgery that will simply never go away. And the bottom line to that is: if you can't learn to enjoy even the drudgery, you won't last long in the profession. There is both drudgery and pleasure to be found in reliability, in painstaking research into the right word, in brain–wracking attempts to recall a word that you know you've heard, in working on a translation until it feels just right. There is both drudgery and pleasure to be found in speed, in translating as fast as you can go, so that the keyboard hums. There is both drudgery and pleasure to be found in taking it slowly, staring dreamily at (and through) the source text, letting your mind roam, rolling target–language words and phrases around on your tongue. There are ways of making a mind–numbingly boring text come alive in your imagination, of turning technical documentation into epic poems, weather reports into songs.

In fact in some sense it is not too much to say that the translator's most important skill is the ability to learn to enjoy everything about the job. This is not the translator's most important skill from the user's point of view, certainly; the user wants a reliable text rapidly and cheaply, and if a translator provides it while hating every minute of the work, so be it. If as a result of hating the work the translator burns out, so be that too. There are plenty of translators in the world; if one burns out and quits the profession, ten others will be clamoring for the privilege to take his or her place. A fast and reliable translator, who hates the work, or who is bored with it, feels it is a waste of time, will not last long in the profession. Pleasure in the work will motivate a mediocre translator to enhance her or his reliability and speed; boredom or distaste in the work will make even a highly competent translator sloppy and unreliable.

Translators should have not only specific translation or vocabulary skills but what we might call “pre–translation” skills, attitudinal skills that should precede and under-gird every “verbal” or “linguistic” approach to a text: intrinsic motivation, openness, receptivity, a desire to constantly be growing and changing and learning new things, a commitment to the profession, and a delight in words, images, intellectual challenges, and people.

Approach to translation might be summed up in the following list of axioms:

1. Translation is more about people than about words.

2. Translation is more about the jobs people do and the way they see their world than it is about registers or sign systems.

3. Translation is more about the creative imagination than it is about rule–governed text analysis.

4. The translator is more like an actor or a musician (a performer) than like a tape recorder.

5. The translator, even of highly technical texts, is more like a poet or a novelist than like a machine translation system.

This is not to say that translation is not about words, or phrases, or registers, or sign systems. Clearly those things are important in translation. It is to say rather that it is more productive for the translator to think of his profession as richly human and not mechanical. Besides, it is the power of the human imagination that actually makes it become more interesting activity. Imagine yourself bored and you quickly become bored. Imagine yourself a machine with no feelings, a computer processing inert words, and you quickly begin to feel dead, inert, and lifeless. Imagine yourself in a movie or a play, enjoying words, their meanings and combinations, and you’ll begin to feel more alive.