Do you need a translation from English into Russian? If the English text was written or translated from another language by non-English speakers, be careful! Surprises are possible.

How to translate “non-English” English?

Some texts in English cannot be translated into Russian or any other language with high quality and accuracy.

To paraphrase Boris Zakhoder, we can say about such texts: “In this tale, it’s quite unclear, Every word’s a riddle here!”. And it’s not about the translator’s qualifications or knowledge of terminology.

Our translator shared his experience and told us about the peculiarities of translating technical texts that were originally translated from another language.

Let’s go in order.

European English

English is the mother tongue of 410 million people. There are about one billion English speakers on our planet. Almost anywhere in the world you can do without a Thai, Spanish or Georgian phrasebook, it is enough to learn the basics of English.

It is also relevant for entrepreneurs. It is enough to translate your website, a description of an IT product or a future sales contract into English, and you are already trading internationally without five minutes. Since from English any interested company itself can organize the translation and make a decision on cooperation. Very convenient!

And this is where the most interesting part starts for translators who receive an assignment to translate from English. An assignment with one nuance: English itself was once the language of translation, not the original.

In simpler cases, when the translation into English was done from some European language – the translator is given the opportunity to show all the linguistic power and erudition. “Oh, this sentence here slips the influence of German syntax on the word order of an English sentence!” “And this one was translated from Italian first, otherwise the sentence structure would be different!” And it’s such a nice feeling that you’ve learned the zen of translation and you’re already reading through the lines, and not a single nuance escapes you.

However, I’ll tell you a secret, if in addition to your main job, i.e. translating the text, you also do syntactic transformations in each sentence, then after 20 pages you begin to understand very well what a squeezed lemon feels like.

“Chinese” English language.

But these are the flowers. The berries begin if the translation into English is sloppily done from a language of another language group – say, Arabic or Chinese. Here you stop the psychic exercises of “oh, I recognize the original from five words” and direct all your telepathic abilities just to dig up some meaning in this set of words.

I remember right after college I worked for a small local firm that bought dishes from China. And here I needed to receive from our Chinese partners “the second page of the last fax”. I yelled into the phone until I was hoarse, and they were on the other end of the line, too, asking me: “What? What do you want?” I guess everyone around me thought that the phone was just a cover for us, but in fact we could hear each other.

I finally realized that the wording needed to change – “I want paper two! Paper two!!!” And so that “paper two” worked its magic and the right document came into our hands. Sometimes, or maybe not so rare, we get documents for translation where instead of the second page it says paper two, and you sit and think – what could it be? Those who loved the team game “crocodile” from childhood will understand my excitement.

Not funny examples

The most odious case of “Chinese” English happened to me about twelve years ago. Our team accepted a large (several thousand pages) assignment for a technical translation of a description of something ultra-modern and wireless.

It was obvious that the Chinese manufacturer, when translating it into English, had scattered its text among twenty or so performers. Unfortunately, this is a peculiarity of technical translation not only in our country. I am not talking about syntax at all. But the terminology (and we all know the mantra that unity of terminology is the alpha and omega of competent translation) was completely absent.

Every Chinese-English translator started their section with a creative selection of terms. And we, too, would start all over again. We had just thought that we had somehow miraculously figured out what this meant and had whipped up a small project glossary to make our lives easier for the remaining seven hundred pages, but no – take a piss and start over.

But there was another case. We were once shown a translation from Chinese into English – a description of the technological bottling line. And we timidly asked whether such a thing could be translated at all. My colleague and I looked at it, consulted and decided to take a risk, warning the customer that we would ask for clarifications. Of course, the customer was not ready to give us all the explanations, but we managed the task. And we felt very satisfied when four months later I got a contract for the purchase of this very bottling line in my hands – so, after all, our creativity helped us to reach an agreement …

Practical advice

If you get your hands on a text that is already a translation, and you need to translate it further, here is what I recommend:

Don’t even start this thankless endeavor.

1. Consult with a proven performer, be it a translator or a translation agency. Let them assess whether the text is well written and translatable in principle.
2. Be prepared to contact the person from whom you received the text to ask clarifying questions.
3. Provide the translator or translation agency with the necessary information that you have at your disposal: explanations to the text, a glossary, previously translated documents. After all, you know much better than the translator that in your case the base is an ecological camp, not a secret military base. Or vice versa.

If you can fulfill these three points, most likely the text, written even in the most Chinese English, in Russian will have a clear meaning and logic – in the skillful hands of competent translators, of course.

Of course, competent translators still need to be found.

And this can be done in the technical translation bureau ATT translations.

But that is completely another story.