GETTING LOST IN TRANSLATION

Those of us EFL teachers who ply our trade in non-English-speaking countries often fancy that a step left into translation may allow a little daylight to be peeked through the bars of our cell windows. Having been in Brazil for five years now, just such a cunning scheme recently filled me with muted enthusiasm, which was soon tempered by various aggravating factors.

Firstly, there is the vastly complex correlation between the intimacy of social bonds and the likelihood of actually receiving monetary payment for your work. Brazilians are instinctively herd animals, and once you have penetrated somebody’s inner group an unspoken regimen comes into play based on the exchange of favours. It is almost unthinkable for somebody to charge a friend anything for services rendered - it goes without saying that brotherly sentiments be expressed through toll-free gestures of kindness and fraternity.

This, as I have found to my cost, also extends to friends of friends. Last month a playmate passed a six-page translation for a cosmetics fair to me that he hadn’t had time to complete for an acquaintance of his wife’s, who works for a makeup maunfacturer. They needed the text the following morning, so I spent that evening duly drafting and perfecting it, before sending it back to them before the eight o’clock deadline the next day. Until today, not only have they not paid me, but they haven’t even expressed their gratitude. If anarchists wanted to bring down corporate capitalism in Brazil, their best bet would be to circulate the theory of the “six degrees of separation”, according to which we are all linked to any other person on the planet through, at the most, six people. Given this revelation, the entire economy would grind to a halt - nobody would end up paying anybody for anything.

I have recently been dabbling in two main forms of translation. One is for undergraduates who are required to write a summary of their dissertations in English (normally not running to more than a page) and the other is dreary doctoral theses on deeply obscure economic theory that, if presented to the likes of Alan Greenspan, I imagine would have him glancing at his watch and settling his distracted gaze on the ceiling tiles.

The former, though shorter, are often morbidly impenetrable texts that, whilst written on fairly straightforward subjects, suffer from a widespread tendency towards overelaboration. Many are the times that I have spent uncomfortable minutes questioning my Portuguese as I stare at the paper utterly confounded, before passing it round the family for second, third and fourth opinions formulated through the use of dictionaries, thesauri and Internet searches. My brother-in-law, who is a brain surgeon, recently took one such summary written by a student of Nursing to his bedroom to engage in some complex codebreaking, only to return half an hour later looking disoriented and mumbling incoherently.

I normally revert to one of two courses of action – strip it down to the barest of bones and produce a text a semi-literate child might copy to practise joined-up writing, or translate it literally into something approaching an extract from Finnegans Wake. The person marking it probably hasn’t even finished Headway Pre-Intermediate (New Edition!) anyway.

Pricing is another can of worms altogether. Eager to seek compensation for the bashing my brains were about to take from another masterpiece of macroeconomic masturbation, for the last thesis I received I resolved to daringly raise my levy by one real (approximately 50 US cents) per page. A deathly, and open-ended, radio silence has since descended.

One of my favourite novelists, Paul Auster, got his big break as a writer when he was asked to translate a Mexican movie script, and was handsomely remunerated for his trouble, according to his account of the episode. I still haven’t given up hope of being contracted by a Brazilian filmmaker, but I suspect that, instead of being financially rewarded, I’d have him cleaning my windows or washing my car for the next five years as part of some kind of primitive barter agreement.

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