I translate, therefore I doubt

Having doubts is an inevitable part of translation, an intellectual activity. For translators, doubt is an inseparable companion when it comes to their daily work. It hinders their task, fuels sleepless nights, clouds judgment, and often survives even the most persistent attempts to banish it.

No translator doubts the existence of doubt. Nor its persistence. There are reasonable, admissible, debatable, and intolerable doubts. There are methodical and fleeting, irresolvable and trivial, insolent and tiresome doubts, elusive enough to camouflage themselves from the sharp eye of the reviewer.

Indecision is among the fiercest enemies of the translator. I have no doubt about that. Setting aside the lack of interest or curiosity, the usual excuse of a lack of time or ignorance — supine or bordering on incompetence — to doubt is their fate. Their duty is to detect the problems lurking in their assignments; if they are an interpreter, to react swiftly without losing sight of them.

Few things unsettle the translator as much as that relentless buzzing of their conscience, which lingers even after the text is finished. Few are as enduring as the doubts not resolved before delivering a translation.

Many times, I doubt and then translate; other times, which are less often, I translate without having doubts. Then, almost always, I end up having doubts.

It is curious to analyse their behaviour when facing doubts; not only to resolve them — as each translator has their own way — but also to remember to settle them when they are postponed.

Let me explain. As one translates and encounters doubts, several things can happen: they may resolve them on the spot and move on; they may sketch out a solution to think it over more calmly later; they may momentarily surrender to a convoluted doubt and tackle it with renewed energy after a break, or a few pages.

There are doubts that resolve themselves when the flow of the text gently reveals the answer. However, as one translates, the opposite can also happen. After a few paragraphs, the translator may start to doubt something they previously took for granted.

Consulting the client about doubts is another possibility, as a last resort like some suggest. In extreme cases, the translator delivers a product with flaws and accompanies it with a necessary notification to tie up loose ends.

Everyone has their own way of remembering pending tasks: repeating them mentally, jotting them down in a diary or on coloured post-it notes, or asking someone to remember to remind them not to forget... When translating, something similar happens with doubts, and I fear that in this case, there are also very personal ways of marking them, of flagging them on paper or the screen, as the case may be.

Some use the question mark: doubt given form. The more one doubts, the more times the mark is repeated; three or more preferably. Exclamation marks, asterisks, brackets, etc., do not fall far behind. If the doubt is more dubious than other doubts, it is bolded, underlined, and, if necessary, the word processor's palette or the handy highlighter can come in useful.

The more abundant the marks are, of whatever type, the greater the doubt; and the greater the danger of it going unnoticed in successive revisions, of it slipping through and falling in the hands of the recipient. It has happened to more than one.

I was saying that “doubtcraft” is something very personal. Each translator gradually develops their own method, relying on intuition and common sense, starting from scratch or from a system inherited from a colleague or client, and turning to the toolbox of a word processor or program at hand. Thus, the way of digitally labelling pending doubts, leaving breadcrumbs along the way to pick them up again, adapts over time to the particular demands of each translator, each assignment, and usually ends up reflecting their character. When indicating the issues they are shelving away in their translations, some are as systematic or as anarchic, as practical or as irresolute, as in life itself — or as when they translate.

Having encountered this issue repeatedly — at the work desk and in class — I pause today to reflect on it, thinking especially of those who are starting out in this profession. I don't think these trivialities are expressly taught in a translation class, or in a translation technologies class.

The main idea is that each person finds their own way that works for them. There are translators who don't even have one — nor do they need it. Nothing to object to, except when they run the slightest risk of leaving a doubt unresolved because it goes unnoticed or because memory fails them when trying to remember in vain "where on earth was that convoluted sentence I had to review."

Others prefer to stick to a manual method, marking them with colours, or noting them down in a notebook or on a piece of paper. This option is perfectly valid as long as the nature of the texts, their complexity, and their length allow it. There are even those who use their system not only when translating but also when drafting any text to record what they need to revisit for later validation.

Having one's own system of defining the problematic points of a translation ultimately has a dual objective: to lose none of them from sight and to retrace our steps, swiftly tracking them as many times as necessary. Before finishing a translation, we should have eliminated all traces of our doubts, or deliberately leave it intact so that a third party can follow it to resolve our loose ends. If a modus operandi can be devised that works for any type of text, all the better. If working in a team or if someone else is involved in the subsequent processing or review of the text, all the more reason to agree on a procedure in advance.

Some translators prefer to use formatting attributes (underlining, colours, highlighting, the possibility of hiding text, etc.) as a distinguishing feature of their doubts. This is a very effective method visually, but it can be impractical due to the hassle of applying (and then removing) it and the computer conversion issues it entails in some systems and programs, which do not always have a mechanism for this purpose. It is also worth remembering that the operations necessary to flag a doubt (moving the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, selecting a menu, searching for the desired option, etc.) will need to be repeated as many times as there are doubts to be signalled. And they can be many.

Acting like a lighthouse, a sign (by itself or repeated) or a combination of several can be chosen. Ideally, the chosen safety pin does not exist as such, or appears only unusually, in a text written in the languages we handle, so that there is no confusion with its usual use. Although it is common practice, it is inadvisable to use question or exclamation marks (? or !), or brackets ([]), for example. However, repeating these signs (???, [[[) or other characters (dd, xx...), or using those that in principle should not appear in the text (ç, «», ¿, ¡, in the case of English) can work decently. Unlikely or impossible combinations of the above (!x, x#, ¿x?...) would also suffice.

It is usually enough to prefix the chosen sign to the doubt in question (xxmy doubt), although we may prefer to indicate where the doubt begins and ends (word, phrase, sentence, paragraph...). One can then choose to repeat the sign or signs (**my doubt**), or to use a double one (<my doubt>), which even allows saving away doubts or accompanying them with annotations (<my doubt<another attached doubt>>, <my doubt<comment>>...).

This system is also practical for keeping the original text alongside a provisional translation proposal (<original<translation>>).

When a doubt repeats itself several times throughout the text, it can be marked only the first time (and a put a reminder to track it later, if necessary), or each time it reappears. It should not be forgotten that, before finishing, all traces must be erased, a task that the translator/reviewer will likely undertake at a time when they will not have much time or peace of mind.

Sometimes, categorising doubts by colour may be useful to indicate their severity or resolution status: red for unsolved doubts, orange for those half-resolved, and green for already resolved doubts but pending a final review to be rid of them for good.
 

If the doubt requires an accompanying comment or explanation — or if a report of the pending points is to be sent to the client or a reviewer — it may be convenient to register them in a separate document, properly indicating their location in the text (file, page, paragraph, line, subtitle number, identifier of a string of computer code, etc.). In such cases, it is advisable to propose a remedy alongside each doubt to facilitate its resolution.

In short, it is about choosing a simple technique and applying it systematically, which requires some discipline.

As long as a uniform method is used — and recognisable as such by a computer system — it can greatly facilitate a tedious task that few translations are exempt from. By doing so, pending doubts can even be counted in some word processors like Word, although it does not come equipped with a specific function for doing so. It is enough to replace, for example, < with < (that is, the same symbol), assuming that this has been the chosen sign, and instruct the processor to execute the command automatically throughout the document. The program will tell you how many times it has replaced the searched item and, therefore, how many doubts remain to be resolved.

And you, how do you flag your doubts? 

Author: Manuel Mata Pastor

Translator and professor of localisation and technology applied to translation

Date: July-October 2003
Source: Centro Virtual Cervantes (CVC) - El trujamán © Instituto Cervantes