Practice makes worse

In Brideshead Revisited, Cordelia Flyte returns from her long sojourn in war-torn Spain and the narrator tells us:

“She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when she said ‘It’s wonderful to be home,’ it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.”

“Constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech.” I was struck by that observation when I first read the book because it described a genuine phenomenon – one that had happened to me. Partly because time spent honing your skills in a foreign language is time not spent refining your use of your native language, but also because aspects of the other language seep into your intercourse in your own tongue, so to speak.

It happens in both speech and writing. If you talk to me in person, you might be surprised by how often I wave my hand in the direction of a thing and say, “the, um, you know, thing,” or use slightly odd phrases like “Don’t put yourself in a drawer” rather than “Don’t box yourself in.” During a game of D&D last weekend, I was roundly mocked for saying “I want him to go over there and molest our characters.” I meant “bother,” and you can blame Spanish for that one.

Because you have more time to think when writing, the effects there are subtler, e.g. lackluster word choice and dull or awkward phrasing.

Working as a translator or interpreter makes the problem more acute because you are constantly under the influence of the specific words and phrases you’re reading and hearing in the other language. And if you’re not careful, the more translation work you do, the worse your product might get over time.

When I started out in this business I was a voracious reader of high-quality English books. So my sense of what constituted good English prose was well developed and I used it to good effect when translating from German.

But the more I worked, the more German I read, and before long, sentences like “St. Florian was not only for a period of ten years the identity-establishing and beloved working place of the composer, but is also well known as his final resting place” started to look OK to me.    

So how does one push back against the deterioration of target-language skills?

1. Read a lot. And I mean good writing – books that have stood the test of time, and new books that have gone through a rigorous process of copyediting and proofreading. Cardinal Newman used to read Mansfield Park every year to keep his prose style on the level. Identify authors and publications that match the style you’re aiming for. Much of what I translate from German has to do with current art exhibits, so I read art reviews in The New Yorker. I have marketing clients so I pay attention to ads and pore over catalogues.
2. Get a copyeditor who doesn’t know your source language. Feedback from someone who is firmly ensconced in your target language is invaluable. Such a person will instantly recognize awkward phrasing that’s crept in from your source language and will know how to fix it. Teaming up with a good copyeditor ensures your translations will be excellent texts in their own right, which is what most of your clients want.