We've beaten this to death: Translators should only translate into their mother tongue. Time to check how often this rule is not observed.

The question is: Do you also translate into foreign languages rather than into your mother tongue only?

Please note that for the purpose of this poll

(a) mother tongue=language of habitual use=dominant language='A' language (we've already beaten those distinctions to death elsewhere),

(b) I am interested in what you do as a rule, not in exceptions. If you routinely translate 10% of your stuff into a foreign language/foreign languages, your answer is #2. If you disagree with that practice, but it just happened this month that you exceptionally and reluctantly had to exclusively translate into a foreign language, your answer is #1.

Jacek

Are we flogging a dead horse?

In any case, my dominant language is English. I only translate into Danish under duress and ONLY if I can purchase the services of a professional Danish linguist to proofread the translation. The services of professional Danish linguists are not cheap. However, I simply cannot justify translating into Danish when I have the feeling that my work could be below par so, I must either pay $00.03 - 00.04 per source word for professional proofreading or refrain - I prefer the latter. Number 1 has my vote. 

Nanna

No, just testing the market. Ethics and principles are one thing, but the reality could be different. Music, for example, is copyrighted and people should be paying to buy it. Do they when they copy CDs or download music from the Internet?

Jacek

The memory of how non-native translators write in English is quite enough to keep me from doing that to THEIR native language(s). I think Chinese is beautiful; I don't want to pollute it with my Chinese writing!

I constantly get requests to "edit" work translated into English by Chinese speakers. Many of the agencies don't understand why I think they are taking bread from the mouths of qualified translators by doing things this way -- not to mention lengthening their own time-to-delivery and lowering quality (even if the translation is "cleaned up" in terms of the English, anyone who truly checked the English against the original Chinese as well as just fixing the English would charge far more than anyone would pay to have "editing" done, because it takes as long or longer than doing the translation from scratch the right way.

Jacek babe,

Why didn´t you also put  " I sometimes translate into a foreign language."

Terry,

You spoke about pollution of the b language. I remember when studying the Nahmad and Haywood Arabic grammar. It has exercises where you have to translate from Arabic to English and from English to Arabic. When my Arabic teacher saw my Arabic sentences a big question mark would appear over his head and he would look at me and ask me: What are you trying to say here?

John

I used to get that question mark back in college, when our Classical Chinese teacher thought it was a good idea to give us homework translating English into Classical Chinese. (Just why this seemed like a good idea, and why he kept it up after seeing the results, is unclear to me. Perhaps he was a glutton for punishment.) We always felt bad to fail him by giving him bad homework, but we just couldn't do any better.

Much later now, I seem to have progressed from the "question mark" stage into the "I know what you mean but why in the WORLD did you choose to say it this way?" stage. I think I preferred the puzzled expressions to the painful ones... at least what they couldn't understand wasn't hurting them!

Originally written by Marina Oliveira on March 20, 2006 10:20 AM ...Three years ago, when applying to colaborate with one of the major Portuguese translation companies, perhaps the biggest, I was required to do a translation into English. I didn't like it but did it...

This reminds me of last year, when my mentor, a Danish state authorized translatør asked me to translate a difficult text into Danish. I did not want to do it and what's more, I did not want to look like a fool. I was pretty certain that it would be a mess of sorts. " No, no, of course not. You can do it, your mother tongue is Danish..." he said, and in spite of my misgivings, he made me do it. The next day, he told me to stick to DA/EN translation

I can write a perfectly okay business letter in Danish. I can correspond with family and friends without skipping a beat, but that is not the same as translating an intricate English text into Danish. I also prefer reading English books since English speaks to me in ways that Danish does not.

Nanna

Because I want you to make a decision as follows: if you consider this an exception, i.e., you subscribe to the native rule and your exceptions only confirm it, no matter how many and how frequent they are, then for my purposes your answer is #1. If, on the other hand, those same incidents cause no problems in your conscience and practice because, for example, you live in a country where it is widely accepted to translate into foreign languages, then for my purposes your answer is #2. So this is about your attitude rather than the volume.

Jacek