Translators as Photographers and How New Technologies Have Changed our Vision of the World

Translation is a bit like photography.

Two hundred years ago, the French inventor Joseph Niépce produced a fixed and permanent image of a view from a window using heliography – one the first photographic processes – which is now hailed as the world’s oldest surviving photograph. His achievement marked the start of a new era and the spread of photographic techniques, allowing accurate and objective images to be created that portrayed reality as it really was.

Since then, photographs have revolutionised our view of the world. One entertaining (and perhaps surprising) example is in horse racing. In the early 1820s, French artist Théodore Géricault painted several pictures showing galloping horses with their legs stretched out simultaneously in front and behind, in a position that seemed obvious at the time but to the viewer today looks completely unnatural. As technology progressed, new techniques were developed and shutter speed became fast enough to produce in-focus images of fast-moving objects, allowing the creation of photographic sequences, which showed that horses do not gallop like that at all; in fact, their legs move alternately in a four-beat gait (see here for more information about horse gaits, for those interested!).

In Géricault’s defence, he wasn’t the only one to have got it wrong !

But what has all that got to do with translation ? Everything.

When horses gallop, their legs are just a blur. The spectators at a race understand that the horses are running from A to B, but they cannot see the way their legs actually move (hence the misunderstanding!). Translators are a bit like the photographer. When a person reads a text in a foreign language or uses a machine translation, they may understand the overall meaning but miss certain details. The translator’s job is to provide a full understanding by conveying all the subtleties – including word play, cultural references and idiomatic phrasing – in the appropriate linguistic style and register.  A good translation enhances the reader’s understanding, going beyond the general meaning and taking communication and knowledge transfer to a new level.

It’s the difference between ‘getting the gist’ and fully grasping something.

That’s the translator’s added value!