номер 5, страница 38 - гдз по английскому языку 5-11 класс учебник Latham-Koenig, Oxenden

4.4.

Part one.

What made you want to be a translator?

It was something that I'd done when I was at university. And when I moved to Spain, it was difficult to get a job that wasn't teaching English. So, I went back to England and I did a postgraduate course in translation. After doing the course, I swore that I would never be a translator. I thought it would be too boring. But I kept doing the odd translation and eventually I, I came round to the idea because I like the idea of working for myself. And it didn't require too much investment to get started. And, and actually, I enjoy working with words, and it's, it's very satisfying when you feel that you've produced a reasonable translation of the original text.

What are the pros and cons of being a translator?

Hmm. Well, um, it's a lonely job, I suppose. You're, you know, you're on your own most of the time. Um, it's hard work. You're sitting there and, you know, you're working long hours. And you can't program things because you don't know when more work is gonna come in. And people have always got tight deadlines. You know, it's really rare that somebody'll, will ring you up and say, I want this translation in three months' time. You know, that, that just doesn't really happen.

Sure.

And the pros?

Oh, the pros are that it, it gives you freedom because you can do it anywhere if you've got an internet connection and electricity. And I suppose you can organize your time because you're freelance, you know, you're, you're your own boss, which is good. I, I like that.

Hmm.

What advice would you give someone who's thinking of going into translation?

Um, I'd say that, I'd say in addition to the language, get a specialty. Do another course in anything that interests you, like, um, economics, law, history, art, because you really need to know about the subjects that you're translating into.

Four point five.

Part two.

Interviewer: What do you think is the most difficult kind of text to translate?

Interviewee: Literary texts, like novels, um, poetry, or drama, because you've got to give a lot of consideration to the author and to the way it's been written in the original language.

Interviewer: In order to translate a novel well, do you think you need to be a novelist yourself?

Interviewee: I think that's true ideally, yes.

Interviewer: And is that the case? I mean, are most of the well-known translators of novels, generally speaking, novelists in their own right?

Interviewee: Yes, I think in English anyway. And people who translate into English tend to be, um, published authors. And they tend to specialize in a particular author in the other language. And of course, if it's a living author, then it's so much easier because you can actually communicate with the author and say, you know, like, what did you really mean here?

Interviewer: Another thing I've heard that is very hard to translate is advertising. For example, slogans.

Interviewee: Oh, yeah, well, with advertising, the problem is that it's got to be something punchy and, and it's very difficult to translate that. For example, one of the Coca-Cola adverts, um, the slogan in English was The Real Thing. But you just couldn't translate that literally into Spanish. It, it just wouldn't have had the same power. In fact, it became sensacion de vivir, which is sensation of living, which sounds sounds really good in Spanish, but it it would sound weird in English.

Interviewer: What about film titles?

Interviewee: Oh, they're horrific too. And people always complain that they've not been translated accurately. But of course, it's impossible because sometimes a literal translation just doesn't work.

Interviewer: For example?

Interviewee: Okay, well, think of, um, you know, the Julie Andrews film, The Sound of Music. Well, that works in English because it's a phrase that you know, you know, like, I can hear the sound of music. But it doesn't work at all in other languages. And in Spanish, it was called Sonrisas y Lágrimas, which means smiles and tears. Um, now, let me, in German, it was called meine Lieder, meine Träume, which means my songs, my dreams. And in Italian, it was Tutti Insieme Appassionatamente, which means, I think, um, altogether passionately, or I don't know, something like that. In fact, I think it was translated differently all over the world.

Interviewer: Do you think there are special problems translating film scripts for the subtitles?

Interviewee: Yes, a lot. There are special constraints. For example, the translation has to fit on the screen as the actor is speaking. And so sometimes the translation is a paraphrase rather than a direct translation. And of course, well, going back to untranslatable things, really, the big problems are cultural and humor, because they're just not the same. You can get across the idea, but you might need pages to explain it, and, you know, by that time, the film's moved on. I also sometimes think that the translators are given the film on DVD. I mean, you know, rather than a written script. And that sometimes they've simply misheard, or they didn't understand what the people said. That's the only explanation I can come up with for some of the mistranslations that I've seen. Although sometimes it might be that some things like, like humor and jokes, especially ones which depend on wordplay, are just, you know, that's they're simply untranslatable. And often it's very difficult to get the right register, for example, with with slang and swear words, because if you literally translate taboo words or swear words, even if they exist in the other language, they may well be far more offensive.