TRANSLATION TODAY: A GLOBAL VIEW

Introduction Arne Zettersten, to whom this publication is devoted, has been one of the pioneers in the study of varieties of English in the world thus adding a global dimension to English Studies. Today's global view of English cannot avoid to take into account the central role of English in translation work and, at the same time, to note that the shift in focus from the Western world to the global stage also changes the emphasis in Translation Studies. Translation has always been international, but this article will address mostly the remarkable changes that have occurred in the fields of practical translation, theoretical Translation Studies, and the interplay between theory and practice with special emphasis on the seachanges since 1990. The first major changes in the field are traced back to the beginning of the 20 t h century, and the article describes the new modes of transfer, their specific constraints and geographical placements. The article then turns towards developments that have become particularly visible or even only introduced within the last decade, such as large-scale useful translation memories, Internet translation, and the introduction of computers at all levels of language work at the European Union institutions. These factors call for new models for the description of translation and the acceptance that target-language texts are not always subordinate to the sourcelanguage texts, the 'originals'.


Introduction
Arne Zettersten, to whom this publication is devoted, has been one of the pioneers in the study of varieties of English in the world thus adding a global dimension to English Studies.Today's global view of English cannot avoid to take into account the central role of English in translation work and, at the same time, to note that the shift in focus from the Western world to the global stage also changes the emphasis in Translation Studies.
Translation has always been international, but this article will address mostly the remarkable changes that have occurred in the fields of practical translation, theoretical Translation Studies, and the interplay between theory and practice with special emphasis on the seachanges since 1990.
The first major changes in the field are traced back to the beginning of the 20 th century, and the article describes the new modes of transfer, their specific constraints and geographical placements.The article then turns towards developments that have become particularly visible or even only introduced within the last decade, such as large-scale useful translation memories, Internet translation, and the introduction of computers at all levels of language work at the European Union institutions.These factors call for new models for the description of translation and the acceptance that target-language texts are not always subordinate to the sourcelanguage texts, the 'originals'.

Until the 20 th century
Translation is a transfer of linguistic messages from one language to another.Accordingly, interpreting must be the oldest form of translation,

Nordic Journal of English Studies
since it has existed ever since the first contacts between humans speaking different languages.It is depicted in Egyptian tombs.Translation in the traditional form presupposes the existence of two written languages and is therefore less than 10,000 years old.
Before the 20 th century there was only a limited number of modes of translation: Consecutive interpreting is an oral rendition in the target language of utterances spoken in the source language.Depending on the competence of the individual interpreter (e.g.talent, short-term memory, and notetaking techniques), the rendition may span from a few words to longer segments of speech.On some occasions, seasoned 'interpreters' may even have delivered 'whispered interpreting' which is nearly simultaneous with the original utterances.Nowadays this is often done by interpreters standing discreetly behind the addressees, at least at high-level political and expert meetings.
Translation (written to written) has been practised in international politics in the broad sense of the word for treaties, agreements, and dictates.In Europe up to the Middle Ages, it was often practised by means of or in combination with a major language or a 'lingua franca' such as Latin.
International trade has called for translation between 'minor' as well as 'major' languages.The kind of translation activity which is best documented and therefore most heatedly debated is that of elitist documents, such as literature and, most importantly, religion.It is quite thoughtprovoking that two of the world's largest religions are based on translation: Buddhist sutras were originally written in Sanskrit and were translated into Chinese (from c AD 150 to c AD 1100), and Christianity is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ who spoke Aramaic.The Aramaic 'origi-nal^)' are not extant, but have been interpreted and translated from c AD 50 to the present day from Latin, Greek and Hebrew -and even English versions.
Prima vista, in which written 'originals' are spoken out in the target language, has probably also occurred when some superior has unexpectedly requested information about what was written in a foreign language, but in the nature of things, we do not know.And, finally, there have been a few cases in which translation has been accompanied by a 'pictorial side', say, in the relatively few drama translations that we find between European languages.From my relatively superficial knowledge of such translations in Europe, I believe that these texts have been adapted rather than what is nowadays considered 'translated' -often because the translators' foreign-language mastery was not really up to the task.
It must also be noted that in the vast majority of cases, translation involved only two languages, one 'binary pair'.

The 20 th century
At the beginning of the 20 th century, with the introduction of silent movies, pictures alternated with intertexts.They identified for instance settings (such as 'In Los Angeles' and 'Meanwhile, in the mountains'), rendered utterances ('What are you doing?' and T feel sick') and were a prerequisite for understanding the action of the film.When films were exported, these intertexts therefore had to be translated from writing to writing.
The introduction of talking films (1927), where the utterances are heard simultaneously with the action, added new modes of linguistic transfer: One of these was synchronisation or dubbing, in which the original is provided with a target-language dialogue.This is sometimes done from the written scripts, but these are often unreliable, which means that most professionals prefer to listen to actual speech in movies and the like.The transfer is thus (ideally) from oral source texts to a hopefully idiomatic, written translation (which is subsequently spoken by actors and recorded for target audiences in countries importing the film).
Another mode primarily connected with the importation of foreign films is subtitling in which the dialogue of the original is retained in the film's soundtrack and the contents transferred to target-language writing, usually in a form that calls for some shortening ('condensation') when conducted between Indo-European languages. 1  A third mode found in films is voice-over.In voice-over, the original speaker is either muted or removed and instead there is a voice (of an actor or announcer) rendering the speech or dialogue in the target language.
In films and television serials, there are sometimes two voices, namely a man and a woman representing male and female characters respectively.
In either case, the translator will work either from written or spoken 'originals' and render them in writing for the persons speaking the lines when the film or documentary is released.
The 20 th century also saw the introduction large-scale of simultaneous interpreting.In simultaneous conference interpreting, participants at international meetings speak into microphones linked to the interpreters' booths.The interpreters render the speeches they hear into the target language so that the addressees get the information in a language they understand.This mode was first used in 1929, and it had its international breakthrough at the Nuremberg war crime tribunals in 1945 against the Nazi leaders of Adolf Hitler's Germany.We may illustrate this procedure with the example of a delegate addressing an international gathering without a manuscript as shown in illustration 1 and, in honour of Arne Zettersten, we shall make this delegate a Swede.

Illustration 1 Swedish delegate addressing an English-speaking audience by means of simultaneous interpreting (ideal):
1.A Swedish delegate speaks in Swedish: A, b, c, d, etc.
Interpreters who understand English and render the English speech into Swedish as they hear it (a, b, c, d, etc.) 4. The Swedish delegates hear the answer m^wedish: X, y, z, etc. /^v.

Interpreters who understand
English and render the English speech into Swedish as they hear it (a, b, c, d, etc.) 4. The Swedish delegates hear the answer m^wedish: X, y, z, etc. /^v.

English interpreters' booth:
1 / 2 The English delegates listen/fo the Swedish message in English: / A, b, c, á, etc. / English interpreters' booth: 1 / 2 The English delegates listen/fo the Swedish message in English: / A, b, c, á, etc. / Interpreters who understand Swedish and render the Swedish speech into English as they hear it (a, b, c, d, etc.) 3.An English delegate answers in English: X, y, z, etc.

Explanatory remarks
In the figure, a Swedish delegate makes a number of points.In order to make sure that the points are getting across, there are at least two professional interpreters in the English booth'.English is their mother tongue, but their understanding of Swedish is 'perfect'.The moment the speaker has uttered enough for the interpreters to get their bearings, they start interpreting into English.This they do into microphones.The English delegation listens to this rendition by means of earphones (which also cut out the Swedish original in order to make for total clarity of the message uttered).After the Swedish speech is over, an English delegate takes the floor and begins to answer.The English speech is then rendered into Swedish by the Swedish booth (interpreters), and the Swedish delegate can then continue the dialogue with the English delegate.
The form thus introduces near-simultaneity between the 'original' and the translational product.The rendition is oral to oral.There are other forms of simultaneous interpreting: there is often simultaneous interpreting at international press conferences, and in some countries, such as Austria, news programmes use media interpreting, showing e.g.British footage but providing simultaneous interpreting.
In the West, operas have since the 1980s increasingly been sung in the original language (that is, mostly Italian, German, or Russian).In these cases a translation is displayed above and occasionally on the side of the stage.This involves not only a translation of the original written script into a written translation, but the translator also has to see to it that the correct segments of translation are shown at the appropriate times.In other words, today there is also opera translation.
Let me add that there are numerous other types.There are software systems with speech recognition which will write the text spoken by a translator (with whose voice the program is familiar) into a microphone; in other words a kind of updated prima vista.In other cases, special modes appear for some time and then disappear again, such as simultaneous subtitling, done on the basis of soundtracks and then made to appear as words (or, rather, syllables) typed by translator-typists for deaf people.And in South Africa you may watch and English-language film on television, turn off the sound on the telly and instead hear the speech and sound on the radio.Some modes of linguistic transfer are confined to special areas: voiceover is employed for documentaries and children's programmes in virtually all countries and for films in relatively poor countries (notably many countries in the former Soviet Union in the years after its dissolution).
Subtitling is found in countries in which a large part of the population is literate (China), and in small nations where the audience will never be large enough to bear the cost involved in synchronisation (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, all with less than 8 million inhabitants), for films appealing to 'small' audiences (German serials broadcast at night in Great Britain, European films screened for intellectuals in Buenos Aires, Argentina, etc.).Religious interpreting which is a 'no-no' for European interpreters has been -and may still be -practiced in Singapore.

Institutionalised translation
The Chinese translation of the Buddhist sutras is among the first known instances of institutionalised translation.These translations were undertaken over a period of more than 900 years.Among others were the Today, there are many international organisations that have several official languages: the United Nations, the international political forum for independent nations in the world, uses English for internal work but issues political statements simultaneously in its six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.The guages, a number which is due to increase.These institutions have a staff of nearly 1,000 interpreters and 3,000 translators and terminologists.

Minority languages
At the same time there has also, both nationally and internationally, been growing awareness of minorities' right to have their own language even within major nations.China has a long and respectable history of accepting the languages of minorities.In Europe, Switzerland has always accepted four languages among its citizens (French, German, and Italian and Raetoroman).The modern European nation states were created in tumultuous processes lasting one hundred years or more after the Napoleonic wars (which came to an end in 1815).The nation states have often had difficulties in accepting minority languages: Official Spain only accepted the minority languages of some of its regions within the last twenty years and Latvia, liberated from the Soviet Union in 1991, only accepted the rights of its 40% Russian minority a few years ago.So the process of acceptance of small languages is slowly but surely gaining ground.
In the US, the 'cradle of democracy' which prides itself on its human rights, it is only within the last decades that everybody on trial in a court of law has obtained the right to be present not only physically but also linguistically (by means of translators and interpreters).
However, the recognition of minority languages is an ongoing process -it has not and will not happen overnight.It is related to simple things such as the general welfare of a society: only societies that are no longer involved in bitter fights for survival can allow themselves the luxury of tolerance.

Minor and major languages
It is even more interesting that the division between major and minor languages is getting blurred: when six European nations laid the founda-tion stones for the European Union in 1957, Italian and Dutch both became 'official languages', but most negotiations and daily work was conducted only in German and French.When Denmark (5.2 million inhabitants) and the UK entered in 1973, the tables were all of sudden turned as the Danes demanded 'equal rights' -and eventually got some concessions.At that stage Denmark itself had accepted that its own linguistic minorities in the North Atlantic, the Faeroe Islands (44,000 inhabitants) and Greenland (56,000 inhabitants) should have near-autonomous status and their own parliaments for local affairs.
The world domination of English as 'lingua franca' should also be taken with a large grain of salt: far from all people who claim to speak 'English' are understandable to most other speakers of English, native as well as non-native.We are seeing a segmentation of 'English'.I predict that there will be a 'world English of top speakers and teachers of Received Standard English' or, in the US, a 'world American'.These branch out into national varieties of Australian, New Zealand, and South African English, all of which have an identity of their own but are spoken by many or even most inhabitants in these countries.Then there are countries in which English is used for business purposes between people of the same 'nationality': Nigeria comprises more than 100 indigenous languages.South Africa has eleven official languages and, in addition, numerous 'heritage languages' which are the first languages spoken by people (at home and in families).
Experts in various fields communicate internationally at conferences, in journals, and on the Internet in some variety of English which is often opaque to outsiders but which has become the acknowledged standard in their respective fields: the essential message is encoded in equations, drawings, sketches and the like, rather than idiomatic and syntactically correct 'English'.
We will therefore not be faced with one 'world-English' but with a very large number of 'regional Englishes' as second languages as well as social and educational segmentations of these types of English.Experts will use types of English that differ from those of tourists, and so on.In other contexts, most obviously international politics, industry, and business, the top politicians and executives will have to depend on the services of linguistic middlemen whose foreign language and cultural competence is tops: There will be an explosion in the number of translators, interpreters, subtitlers, surtitlers and the like in the globalised world of tomorrow.
The national languages and even minority languages will not be replaced by a world English in the foreseeable future.There are clear indications that the small languages are hitting back: whereas English was the dominant language on the Internet in terms of web sites, home pages and the like in the beginning of the 1990s, the latest figures show that it is now down to 40% of the number of accessible home pages -and the number of 'English only' home pages is declining rapidly as the number of pages in other languages, national as well as those of minorities, is increasing (The figures released on the Internet by e.g.Systran should be viewed with considerable skepticism).
The last decade of the 20 th century The most momentous and sudden changes in the world of translation and interpreting took place in the last decade of the 20 th century.
The 'machine translation systems' came of age, and developed in ways that could be put to practical use around 1990.
The large-scale use of computers (and the complementary electronic tools including translation memories) by all the 3,000 translators and some of the nearly 1,000 interpreters at the European Union institutions meant that enormous corpora of translations became available to language professionals at the EU institutions.which is used for 'translating' more than 500,000 pages a year for nonlinguistic staff.The system is strictly for internal use, the products must never be released to others than the user in question, and it is not accessible to the public.The main strength is that it is near-instantaneous and serves to give a staff member an overview of the general contents of a document.The translation may be post-edited (that is, 'edited for better readability 7 ) if the staff member using the system requests this.
Small translation agencies usually specialise in one or two fields which means that there will often be previous translations concerning the subject matter.When they introduce translation memory systems (often abbreviated to TM) these function well for translation work.The last time I looked into it, it took a firm with four employees about six months before the investment began to pay off.Now they will have their databanks transferred from one computer to newer models, thus accumulating the amount of previous translation readily at hand, and will consequently have increased the number of pages they translate per day.If they boost the process by scanning previous source texts and translations optically, they will increase output even more.

Internet translation
The principles of Internet translation are, to some extent, the same as those mentioned above.Small surprise, for the machine translation system available free of charge is, usually, an earlier version of SYSTRAN than the one for sale on the commercial market.There are other transla-tion systems, depending on the search engines one uses.The procedure is extremely simple.One accesses a search engine, such as www.alta vista.com, asks for some information in Spanish, French, or English, copies it, and then returns to the start page of the search engine.Here one clicks on the 'Translate' option, dumps the material and receives a 'translation' in English, Spanish, or French.
It will have been noted that I focus on three languages only, although the Internet system prides itself on having numerous language combinations.However, the only combinations which work well enough to give a general idea of the potential of Internet translation are English, French, and Spanish.In the case of English, this is clearly because so much has been translated into and from it.French is strong because it was previously used in international treaties -and more importantly -because all documents in Canada must be written in both Canadian-English and Quebequois-French, the latter having much in common with written French.The reason why Spanish is strong is partly due to the translation activity between South and North America, but also because Spanish translators are best at providing the machine systems with feedback leading to improvements.
In order to provide my readers with a general impression of the poten- There are howlers, to be sure.We have to rethink our approaches to translation and translational products.I suggest that we do this in small doses:

The autonomous translations
In the study referred to above (1999), I found that within the 170-year timespan there were nearly 100 different Danish versions of 'Hansel and Gretel' which were all ascribed to the brothers Grimm by the Danish national copyright library.The story deals with a brother and a sister who are deliberately abandoned in the woods, brave dangers including a witch who wants to eat the boy, and it comes to a happy ending because the siblings are loyal to one another.Regarding the 'linguistic layer', Danish This leads to the question of the independence of translations from their origin.
The study showed that different translations of the same stories may coexist -and even be published the same year and sell well.It also showed that translations may persist even when the original is Tosf.Thus some Grimm tales translated into Danish remained 'alive' in Denmark for nearly 80 years in the edition of the Grimm Tales used by middle-class Danish households even though they had only appeared in one of the seven 'authorised' German editions.
The same goes -more strikingly -for the Christian Bible (that is 'the New Testamenf) which, as mentioned, has no extant Aramaic 'original'.Nevertheless, this book has permeated Western life for nearly 2,000 years.
In other words, translations acquire an autonomous life not only in terms of being selected for translation, but also in their translated forms.And it is even possible to talk about translations targeted towards special groups.
This has been the case in Europe in practical work.Geoffrey Kingscott (2002) mentions that when a British translator must render the German instruction, for instance, for a lawnmower, he will disregard the general introduction which is part and parcel of an instruction in German, and go straight to the instruction itself.Similarly, most international companies today either use 'localisation' in their translation work, or have staff from their foreign markets produce public relations material, ads and the like, so as best to reach potential customers.
Arabic centres of translation in the city of Baghdad (in present-day Iraq in the ninth and tenth centuries) and in present-day Spain (mostly in Toledo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).Paradoxically, these Arabic translation activities saved many of the central works of Greek and Roman antiquity as well as much Arabic scholarship for the European renaissance (c AD 1400).The first well-documented truly multilingual political meeting in Europe was the so-called 'Congress of Vienna' (1814-1815) where more than 200 European rulers or their delegates met in the capital of Austria to determine European borderlines after the Napoleonic Wars.There were repeat performances in the course of World War 1 and at war tribunals after World War 2.
language work is done by a permanent staff of c 450 translators and 150 interpreters in addition to free-lancers.The largest professional staff of translators is found at the European Union institutions.They tie together fifteen European countries by means of translation from and into the eleven official Ian-Nordic Journal of English Studies

Finally
, machine translation took to the Internet in 1997 and 1998 (first in Babelfish and then Systran itself).The changes are daunting.Teamwork These changes can probably best be described by two key terms: recycling and teamwork.These were unquestioned parts of the Chinese way of life until the advent of Western traders and continue to this day: Thus the Works of Chairman Mao Tsetung were translated by a large team of translators.Teamwork and recycling were rarely key words in the Western world in its development in the last five hundred years.There is now a dawning comprehension, notably in politics and education that groups of people may share loyalties and can work together as equals, recognising differences in ability, competence, and knowledge.Teamwork has been known for half a century in a few translation agencies in the West, but in general it has been slow to seep down in professional translation circles in the West where -until twenty years ago -one would meet translators who jealously guarded and treasured their specialist vocabularies.However, the United Nations as well as the European Union both of which have come into existence after 1945, have recycled translations in so far as new legislation would have to follow the precise wording of previous translations concerning the same field.Until the large-scale introduction of computers, the mere identification of such previous translation ('documentation') was a time-consuming process demanding use of dictionaries, terminology lists, and complex indexing systems.Now the translators in these organisations can, immediately, store all documentation needed for an assignment on their computers and, if needed, access the whole store of the organisation's previous translations of legally binding agreements.The computer will tell the translator immediately whether a sentence has been translated before and in which form: if le-Nordic Journal of English Studies gaily binding, the phrasing of the first finalised directive cannot be changed.However, if it is an ad hoc translation, the translator can re-use previous suggestions or -perhaps -be inspired to write something new and more adequate.There are numerous systems on the market, with TRADOS, SYSTRAN and 'déjåvu' dominating in Europe.The European Union institutions now have their own advanced version of SYSTRAN tial relevance of Internet translation, I can give a real-life example: I pick an article on page 6 in the national Spanish newspaper 'El mundo' (= The World): "Y la sharia funciona perfectamente en Sokoto [in Nigeria].'Este es el lugar más seguro del pais.Aquí nunca hubo matanzas, come en el estado vecino de Kano [another province in Nigeria]', asegura un cristiano que tiene aqui un comercio desde hace 25 afios ..." I ask for a translation from Spanish into English.Within seconds I get the following rendition: "And the sharia works perfectly in Sokoto."This it is the place more surely of the country.Here never there were slaugh-ters, like in the neighboring state of Kano," assures a Christian who has been having here a commerce for 25 years." translators have gradually ceased to render the German diminutives (implying sentimentality).At the 'content layer' Danish translators have chosen not to translate most references to Christianity.The most interesting deviation at the 'content layer 7 is that whereas the first German versions (from 1812 to 1840) asserted that the adults were the children's biological parents, the foolhardy father was convinced by the children's stepmother in German ever since 1843.Nevertheless there were, as late as 1972, Dan-ish translations stating that it was the children's own mother who left them in the woods.Danish translations thus established a tradition different from that of the 'original'.No matter what happens at these layers in translation, the 'intentional layer' makes it in all accepted translations: children's fear of losing parental care and the importance of brothers and sisters of helping one another.
The system is far from perfect.Yet this translation does give us a fairly accurate picture of what the article is about.It is thought-provoking that, as mentioned, Internet translation has been available only since 1997 and that the Internet as such has only been in use for the public since 1992. 2 we can easily rephrase the above translation into something readable: "The sharia works well in Sokoto."This is the safest place in the country.There have never been any murders here, unlike in our neighbouring state of Kano," assures a Christian man who has had a business here for 25 years."InJuly2002, it was estimated that at least 6 million pages were 'translated' in this way on the Internet every day.3Justthink of what will hap- that can search a million bilingual home pages in a matter of seconds and suggest different translations which are equally adequate in different situations for the same source-language segment.