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German to English
What about Sentence Structure? Aside from my occasional struggles with certain individual terminology, nothing has giving me more of a challenge than the difference between German and English sentence structures. Surely, restructuring the word order would not be as hard were it not for the all important theme/rheme considerations. This has been particularly difficult with some of the long-winded legal texts where slight changes in the word order can lead to slight, but significant changes in the overall message.

German-Swedish
Understanding passive as imperative. When translating from German into Swedish, I now and then encounter a problem with understanding the passive German tense.

For instance, quite often a technical text doesn’t include clear imperative instructions like “Check value A to judge if you need to stop the machine”, but rather “The value A has to be checked in order to judge if the machine needs to be stopped”. So the problem is who is supposed to check this. The reader of the text? Or should he/she get some expert to do this for him/her? Just like in English, in Swedish we often have clear instructions about who is going to do what in order to get this or that. German, otherwise a very precise language, isn’t that clear in this aspect. Very often the “pure” imperative is avoided in German, and passive is used instead.

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Another problem is an illogical order of different actions: “Press button A and then B. Before doing so, please check if the temperature is below 50 centrigrades”. For my understanding, it would be much better (and most technical writers would agree, I think), to structure the sentences in the same order as the actions have to be carried out. But this would be a life task.

German to Swedish (reply)
Quote ‘I now and then encounter a problem with understanding the passive German tense’.Reply ‘Wouldn’t that be a fault on the writer’s part?’

Reply to above:
Well, it’s not really seen as a fault, rather than a standard style used to “keep a certain level” – nobody seems to care if the message is confused! Apart from many passive constructions, in German texts you find very many nouns (originally from verbs) which often need to be translated as verbs.

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Example of garbled German (badly translated, but shows the case with noun): “The opening of this door is forbidden”

This needs to be translated at “It is forbidden to open this door”, or “You may not open this door” etc.

From my point of view, the written German in manuals and other documents is very focused on nouns and passive forms, and doesn’t have much in common with the standard spoken language.

These tips are brought to you by Translation Services UK who also offer a free translation service on their website. Remember, if you are going to get your document(s) translated then printed please make sure you use people and NOT software.

aseven general Challenges, English Sentence, German English, German To English, German Translation Services, Imperative, Legal Texts, Precise Language, Press Button, Sentence Structure, Sentence Structures, Sentences, Swedish Reply, Technical Writers, Tense, Word Order

English to Turkish
Turkish – lack of uniform vocabularies, among others. I translate from English into Turkish, a language with very different vocabulary, syntax, word order etc. from English, and from Indo-European languages in general. This poses some well-known challenges and translators have effectively devised ways of handling them. For instance, the word order is Object+Subject+Verb (or, the Object and the Subject may change places in this formula), as opposed to the Subject+Verb+Object order of English. So, an English sentence beginning as “I go…” and describing how and where you go through a dozen words to follow, might pose a problem of clarity if you translated it as is: the verb would then be at the end and the reader would miss out the meaning until he arrived there. The typical way of handling this is divide the sentence and even though, in some sentences, this might be a more complex challenge than it seems, it is within the control of the translator to solve it.

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The real difficulties in this combination and direction are due to factors that are beyond the control of translators. The history of Turkish might be a bit more turbulent than most other languages. It borrowed heavily throughout its history and these borrowings were usually a result of political or cultural alignments, with every new alignment purging its predecessor’s vocabulary. The result is a lack of uniform vocabularies in different fields, and moreover, these vocabularies are incompatible with each other. The same concept may be expressed with a term of Arabic origin in law, one of Latin origin in medicine, and one of Turkic origin in daily speech. So if the original text uses this concept with reference to all, and worse, with word plays touching all fields, it is very difficult to impossible to reflect this in the target text. Just an example springing to mind now, a sub-heading in a book from years ago (funny, I forgot the book itself): From Nuclear Family to Nuclear War. It is impossible to reflect this word play in Turkish without being awkward.

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Also, like I said above, these terms for the same concept, but of different bloodlines may be totally incompatible with one another. For instance, English, which has a similar heavy borrowing history, may use lethal, fatal, deadly, mortal, terminal all in the same text. In Turkish this would be much more difficult to achieve with a natural flow.

These tips are brought to you by Translation Services UK who also offer a free translation service on their website. Remember, if you are going to get your document(s) translated then printed please make sure you use people and NOT software.

aseven general Alignment, Alignments, Arabic Origin, Borrowings, Clarity, English Sentence, Heading, Indo European Languages, Latin Origin, Object Subject, Predecessor, Sentences, Subject Verb, Target Text, Translator, Translators, Turkish Translation Services, Vocabularies, Vocabulary, Word Order