Did any of you translate Erin McKean's talk? For those who haven't, here's a small extract.
'Lexicographical' is the same pattern as higgeldy piggeldy.
Right? It’s a fun word to say, and I get to say it a lot.
I would add to that: higgeldy-piggeldy is also a fun word to translate.
In Dutch, I used 'olleke bolleke', as in…
Olleke bolleke, rubisolleke,
olleke bolleke, rubisolleke, olleke bolleke, knol!
Luckily, this nursery rhyme is known
in both of the major regions where Dutch is spoken.
Dutch is the mother tongue of 23 million people,
of whom 16 million live in the Netherlands,
6 million in the Northern part of Belgium, also known as Flanders,
and 400.000 in Suriname, in South-America.
We have an official 'Dutch Language Union'.
So where's the problem?
Dutch from the Netherlands and Dutch from Flanders
sound very different.
If you meet Johan Cruyff in the morning,
and if you're lucky, he will say 'Goeiemorgen' to you.
Kim Clijsters will say 'Goeiemorgen'.
In subtitling, this is of course irrelevant.
So once again: where's the problem?
We also use different words.
A Dutchman will call this a 'klokkromme'.
In Flanders we call it a 'Gauss-curve'.
Last but not least, each group has their set of 'typical doubts',
or deviations from Standard Dutch
that occur more in one or the other region.
Over the years, the Dutch have lost their sensitivity
to the gender of Dutch nouns.
And so only a Dutchman might wonder
whether a cow is male or female
… or so we teasingly say, in Flanders.
In Belgium, on the other hand, whether we like it or not,
our language is influenced by our French-speaking fellow countrymen,
leading to sometimes awkward constructions borrowed from French.
So there's the problem:
if a reviewer from the Netherlands
reviews the work of a colleague from Belgium,
she might see a text which she herself
would never have written that way,
and the other way round.
If she starts correcting it,
before she knows it, she will be caught up
in an endless yes-no-discussion.
It happened to me in my early TED days.
I even confess that for my very first translation,
I made sure I asked a translator from my own country
to review it, because I felt uncomfortable
with a review from the 'other side'.
But I quickly learned that if you stick
to a limited number of ground rules,
you can easily overcome this difficulty.
This is what I want to share with you today.
The best way to stop discussions about 'who is right',
is to agree on the standards you use.
For Dutch, that is quite easy.
The official thesaurus, the main dictionary
and the standard grammar are all accessible online.
All three are widely used and accepted
in the Netherlands and in Belgium.
If you indicate from the beginning
that you will use these as a standard,
you can avoid a lot of tension and discussion.
But even if a word 'exists',
it may be highly unusual in one of the two regions.
Take the 'klokkromme'.
It's a word hardly any Belgian would use,
but on the other hand it is not difficult to understand
-- especially not in context,
as is the case in TED Talks.
There's really no point in replacing it
with a term that no Dutchman would ever use.
I much rather treat it
as a 'word worth spreading'.
Of course, if the unusual word is difficult
to understand, the story is different.
But then again,
rather than replacing the word with a Flemish one,
I invite my translation partner
to look for an alternative
that is acceptable to both of us.
I would like to end with a few words
about what I try to to keep in mind
when reviewing or translating into Dutch.
First of all, I keep my audience in mind.
I am writing for people from different regions.
I might as well try to step into their shoes
and avoid words or expressions
that I know are confusing.
Secondly, I keep in mind my translation partner,
especially when reviewing.
In one of my early reviews,
I made the mistake of marking the translation as reviewed
without having contacted my partner.
After all, I thought I had only
corrected some obvious mistakes.
Since then, I always contact the translator
and invite them to let me know
whether they agree with my proposals.
Thirdly, I keep in mind that I translate for TED
in order to help spreading
the interesting ideas of the speakers.
It's not about “winning” discussions
with other translators,
it's about working together
to provide access to TED
to as large an audience as possible.
Last year, a TED Translator from the Netherlands
asked me whether I thought we should
have separate sets of translations
for Dutch from the Netherlands and from Belgium.
I told him that to me
that made no sense at all,
since it would only double the effort
to spread the ideas.
It did spur me to get better
at finding common ground across the regions.
Last but not least, I can tell you
that translating for TED has been
an immensely enriching experience to me.
My closing thoughts are therefore
for my fellow TED Translators.
I would have liked to create
some kind of ‘Hans Rosling’ graph,
but you will have to do
with a wordle
in which the size of the name
represents the number of times I worked with them.
I wish all of you an excellent workshop
and an exciting TED Global 2011.