Is Translation a Finished Product?

It is once said that a work of art is never finished; it is abandoned. I think this also applies to translation. Five months ago I was commissioned by a publishing house to translate HC Armstrong's book “Lord of Arabia” into Arabic. This was the first work I do for publishing, which meant exerting extra efforts and paying more attention to details as it simply meant the real start of my professional career as a translator. The years of study and translation were only an anticipation of this day. I sat forth translating the book after an initial reading to build some horizon of expectations and to be well prepared to choose the best terms and expressions from the wealth of alternatives available in the dictionary and my mental lexicon. Every writer and translator brings to the text she writes or translates an age-old history of prejudices and perspectives that would definitely affect her linguistic choices and finally the quality of her translation. In fact, the book was discussing the history of the Saud Family and the role of Wahhabism in the rise of the new Saudi state. As a Muslim, I have a set of preconceived ideas and stereotypical images of what a Wahhabi could be. Though consolidating many ideas and images I have of Wahhabism, the first reading I did was also instrumental in dispelling many others and to remind me of my ethical role as a translator. In this essay, I wanted to highlight the fact that the translation of a text is a dynamic process that takes shapes and finally crystallize into a product after a number of tests and continual refinement.

In my translation, I had first to figure out a way to approach the text following the cursory reading I did at the first place. Therefore, I realized that to come up with a well-received translation, I had to rely as much on encyclopedias and the Internet as I do on dictionaries. In the translation of technical and historical materials, the linguistic knowledge is by no means enough and the translator has to rely heavily on relevant non-linguistic materials to render her translations perfect.The linguistic knowledge enables the translator to decode the target text; nevertheless, a knowledge of the materials at hand should complement that linguistic competence in order for the translation to make sense. The translator should also bear in mind that she is translating a text for it to be read by a certain community of readers; otherwise, the translation would be no more than a pastime and unreasonable. In fact, it is that community of specialist readers who should always be present in the mind of the translator while she is engaged in that act of translation. An unintelligible or poor translation means the ruin of one's career as a translator. That readers community is the one who translates and the real agent deciding the final form of the translation.

After having prepared my translation tools and materials I started the process of rendition moving regularly back and forth in conjectural leaps between my mental lexicon, the dictionary and the encyclopedia represented by the world wide web. These conjectural leaps allowed me first to guess the meaning of words (linguistic knowledge) and the correct transliteration of the names of people and places (extra-linguistic knowledge) and confirming or refuting them as I move. The Internet provided me with complete essays and sometimes chunks and chopped sentences on the material I was handling. A cross-comparison of the search results was also useful in corroborating the choices I made. If the Internet failed, I usually contacted some of the people I know to ask them for the information I needed.

However, despite these great efforts and strenuous process of decision making, when the translation was finished and sent to the client there remained some of the transliterated names that I was not sure of. I left it to the publisher who was definitely going to review the text before publication.

After I finished the translation of the book I left Jordan to the United States. Sometime after I arrived in the States, I was invited to have dinner by an old Bedouin man who was resettled in the States a couple of years before me. While driving he told me of the tribe he belongs to, which was AlRuwalla. As soon as the old man mentioned the name of his tribe, I was struck to realize the first mistake in my translation. In fact, Armstrong's transcription was totally correct, but since I never heard of the name of that tribe, I was not able to transliterate it correctly back into Arabic.

A couple of months later, while I was browsing YouTube.com for some videos I came to realize my second mistake, which was also due to a deficit in my extra-linguistic knowledge. This time, it was the name of one of the tribal Sheiks by then, Hithlain. I transliterated the name sound by sound into Arabic and thus echoed the English sounds of the name rather than the true Arabic ones. I should have realized that the “H” stood for the pharyngeal sound /ḥ/ in Arabic and “th” for /θ/ so that my rendering of the name should have read /ḥɘθlein/ in stead of /hɘðlein/. As soon as I realized my mistakes, I wrote to my client informing him of the errata. I was really relieved when he wrote back to me to thank me and to tell me that it was their practice to review and edit all the translations before publication. A good relationship between the translator and her client is indispensable for producing translations of publishable quality.

No translation, therefore, is finished. To say that there is one and only one correct translation of a text is reductio ad absurdum indeed. This would suppress the plurality of readings and interpretations of texts and would render understanding, cognition and experience as absolute and immutable. However, there are more acceptable, reasonable, justifiable and well-grounded translations provided that the translator is responsible for the linguistic and extra-linguistic choices she made. Moreover, as far as transliterations are concerned, yes, there are correct and incorrect forms of translation. The translator's mission is first to make up her mind as to be faithful or not. Second, she has to make provisions for the requirements of the job at hand. Third, she should be acquainted with the map of the text at hand; its starting point, resting stations, main topics and places and destination, inter alia. In this sense, translation approaches a journey into an unknown terrain and the translator, like a traveller, should always be knowledgeable of the road map, where to rest, and what to prepare for that journey before setting forth. It is not a journey into the unknown and the translator should also learns more and more as she makes her progress on.