In any translation process there are numerous small words, phrases and bits of punctuation that, for one reason or another, come through in the target language still smelling of the source language. These are mostly false friends (chef/szef), and literalisms (sympathetic/sympatyczny), but are also sometimes the result of simple time pressure or ingrained learning. For example, putting an unnecessary comma before ‘that’ in English, because we usually say ‘comma że’ in Polish. This results in grammar, punctuation and other technical problems in the Target Text. Another common source of trouble stems from the fact that Polish lacks the heavy contextualising of English, and often uses more words than are strictly necessary to do the job in English.
Apart from the eternal frustration of microscopic deadlines and clients who neither know nor care (or worse, think that they know better than the language professionals!), the constant, speedy evolution of vocabulary and usage is the other great culprit. Great swathes of language as it is learned in the traditional manner through schools, tutors, books and tapes etc, is out of date almost as soon as it is taught. This leads to the amusing phenomenon of non-natives of a language being able to speak it more clearly and with better understanding than some of its native speakers, because the non-native was taught the language without all the bewildering slang, loan words and learned errors that make up half a language at any given time.
Of course, with the Internet it's pretty easy to keep a tab on your target languages, but as much good information as there is, there's also three times as much crap. Particularly horrifying are the numerous ‘online dictionaries’, most of which should be avoided like the plague. The other side of that coin, though, are the user-defined sites such as the slang dictionaries. Whilst most of them describe the kind of language that would give your mother a heart attack, they can be a useful resource for modern literary translators (although as with any un-moderated user-submitted content, you should be 200% sure of what you’re taking from them).
What I want to do with this blog is describe all the most commonly occurring problems in Polish to English translations, and while not everything will be relevant to you personally, perhaps some of it will be at least helpful (not least because we’ll be looking at a lot of formatting issues common to any ST>EN translation). As I said above in the first post (yay!), we will be drawing on mixed resources, including already well-known items, my own experience of translating and proofreading in the Polish/English language pair, and anything else that comes up day by day.
One final thought for you – some of the items we’ll look at may seem obvious or unnecessary to know – surely some of this stuff is only the proofreader’s concern? But for those occasions when you know your work is going directly to the end reader with no further editing or proofing, or you know the client is a difficult one, then perhaps this will help you nail down every last detail, ‘just in case!’
Lastly, although the obvious intention is to provide a concrete, 100% solid gold explanation of each item, there’s nothing that we can’t change, correct or improve if we feel that it needs doing so. Please do feel free to comment below (just click on the thing that says ‘x comments’), and we’ll bang our heads together (albeit gently if anyone’s hung over ;).
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