Warning: ranting ahead

I got a job. A small one.

I won't get paid for it. That's just how stupid I am.

Well, no. As the Joker would say, it's not about the money. Not only will I get valuable experience in translating, but also something to add to my CV. My CV's a big fat joke; it's mostly just a slew of assignments for the department. I don't think of them as "real" jobs, because they're so closely related to my studies and research.

I've done a little bit of proofreading and checking some data for my professor. It helps to improve my own English when I correct somebody else's. I get useful references to interesting works, and sometimes even gain some theoretical insights. What's also comforting is to notice that his English isn't infallible, either. Maybe I can cut some slack for myself.

Once I got paid for gathering texts that I found and wanted to use for my thesis, something I would have done anyway. It led to me landing another corpus-related job where I categorized a corpus of historical texts according to genres. I'm not sure I was terribly successful, after all how could you possibly have texts from say the 16th century under the same genre as texts from early 20th century! For the most part, there's obviously not much overlap in that respect.

In any case, naturally it was helpful in thinking about methodology in corpus linguistics, because categorizing and the makeup of corpora are at the heart of it, in my humble opinion. Being forced to take into account so many issues in corpus creation, it often made me wonder about how little it's talked about in courses and seminars.

Based on that kind of job experience, however, I wouldn't hire me. Thankfully some people are easy to fool.

As for the job, it's creating English subtitles for a Finnish documentary. I'm lousy at translating from English to Finnish, but the other way around I'm actually quite comfortable with. I know that even professional translators shy away from translating into a foreign language, for good reasons, but I'm not too worried about it. I've received some pretty good feedback for my English translations. Should be fun anyway.

What's terrifying about translating though is the fact that it's so public. Translators are fair game for anyone to bash. They're flamed for the slightest slip or error. Of course it can be fatal sometimes, but often it doesn't really affect your understanding of what's happening.

Take for instance the new Batman film, Dark Knight. I only spotted one translation error. Fair turned to fear (in Finnish), but it didn't really matter for that scene. Only if you're a die hard fan of the Batmanverse and want to know exactly what's being said, how each and every word might tell something more about a particular character.

People don't often realize just how many things you have to take into account in audiovisual translation. The space and time available for each line place major restrictions on translational possibilities. Often you don't get a transcript but have only your hearing to rely on.

Sometimes you don't even have a whole day to work on it, let alone several. What's even worse, since anyone can call themselves a translator, those who've actually gone through an academic training and rarely make errors may nonetheless get the "credit" for poorly done work by amateurs.

I don't think I've ever seen any translator get praise for a good job on a tv show or film. Prose translators, on the other hand, are occasionally lucky enough to get acknowledgement or praise for their good work. So they should, because we need translators and translations. Nobody can learn every language, and even those foreign languages that you know well (or think you do) you'll never know as well as your mother tongue.

You may come close and you may not need translations most of the time, but I'm not convinced it can ever be the same experience as it would be in your mother tongue.

Thus spake Elina, eternally annoyed by overblown criticism of translators and their undervalued but necessary work. (Thus spake Zarathustra is a good book by the way.)