What linguistic challenges does your language pose. part 3
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.
