Natural Translation Has No Age Limit

The other evening we went to a dinner party held for a friend’s birthday in a local restaurant.

We were nine at table:

Eight could speak English
Of the eight, five could only speak English
Three could speak English and Spanish
One could only speak Spanish.

It was obvious and inevitable that the conversation would be conducted overwhelmingly in English; and that the ninth person, the unilingual Spanish speaker – let’s call him Jorge – would be isolated for most of the meal unless we did something about it. So I sat down next to him, expecting to interpret.

I needn’t have bothered. Seated opposite Jorge was a bilingual Spanish lady. She interpreted for him everything that was said in English, sometimes in full and sometimes in summary. She said it out loud, she didn’t whisper it; but there’s always so much noise in Spanish restaurants – and especially Valencian ones – that nobody was disturbed by her. She also translated into English things that she had first said herself to Jorge in Spanish. I noticed that sometimes she produced translations of items on the menu faster than I could think of them myself: clóchinas/small mussels and costillas adobadas/marinated spareribs for example. I ended up doing barely a few words of interpretation throughout the four hours.

Now, I happen to know something about that lady’s background. She was born and brought up in Spain and left school at age 14. She had no higher education. At 16 she went to England as an au pair girl (a young foreign woman who helps out with household chores and childcare in exchange for board and lodging). There she married a unilingual Englishman and stayed in England for some 50 years. So her English became fluent, though she still has a heavy accent which leaves you in no doubt that she isn’t a native speaker. She returned to live in Spain 12 years ago. She had no training in translation, not even an English language course.

She therefore conformed to the two basic elements in the definition of a Natural Translator:

* No training in translation
* Translating in everyday circumstances.

She must have had some exposure to translation, and have done quite a lot of it spontaneously as at this dinner. But still I would say that she comes close to being a Natural Translator.

She’s now in her late seventies. Natural Translation has no age limit.

The Pageboy Interpreter

Non-professional, untrained bilinguals have sometimes been called on to translate at important events and negotiations above their normal status. Here's a little story about one of them.

The Peninsula hotel is a luxury establishment on the Avenue Kléber in central Paris. It used to be called the Hotel Majestic until it was bought by its present owners, who didn't respect its history. When the original building was put up in 1864 it had connections with the Spanish royal family. Much later, in the 1920s, it was the site of a famous dinner party that was attended by Diaghilev, Picasso, Joyce, Proust and other luminaries of the artistic world. Then in 1940 it was taken over by the Nazi conquerors and for the rest of the occupation of Paris it served as one of their headquarters. The rest of its distinguished history can be read in the Wikipedia article referenced below.

In August 1944 the Free French forces and their allies arrived to retake Paris.

"The final battle for The Majestic took place on 25 August in the afternoon as Jaques Massu and Colonel Paul de Langlande of the 2nd Armored Division (France) moved their troops from the Champs-Élysées to the heavily fortified and barricaded Avenue Kleber. One of Massu's officers worked his way around the rear of The Majestic on Rue la Perouse, which was protected by a blockhouse that could only be subdued by a bazooka, but the Germans inside the hotel said they would be willing to surrender to regular soldiers, rather than men of the Resistance. A German spokesman was brought to Massu under a white flag and with Langland'e approval, Massu went to The Majestic accompanied by Senior Sergeant Dannic. As they approached Dannic was shot dead by a sniper firing from the hotel's rooftop. Despite this, Massu continued up the hotel's steps and entered The Majestic's lobby to find fifty German officers and 300 other ranks. The Germans surrendered to Massu without further resistance, using a bilingual bell-boy from the hotel as their interpreter."

Source
The Peninsula Paris. Wikipedia, 2019. Emphasis added.

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German officers held prisoner in the Majestic.

Translating in Old Age

 

 

“There are many mentions in this blog of how young humans can be when they start to translate, but how old can they get before they lose the power?”

The question was posed in a post on this blog in 2011. It bore the title Old translators never die.. they simply fade away. (To retrieve it, enter toronto eighties in the Search box on the right.) During the intervening decade, little has been done to answer it.

 

So in the absence of scientific studies, we are forced into the realm of the anecdotal  and what follows is some of it. Nevertheless it provides us with clues for the formation of some hypotheses.

 

Back in 2020 there was a post on this blog about a lady, a Spanish natural translation interpreter, who helped out impromptu at a bilingual dinner party. To retrieve it, enter no age limit in the Search box on right the right.

“She interpreted… everything that was said in English, sometimes in full and sometimes in summary. She also translated into English things that she had first said herself… in Spanish. I noticed that sometimes she produced translations of items on the menu faster than I could think of them myself. She had no training in translation, not even an English language course.”

She was in her late seventies.

 

A little later, in 2011, there was the post Old Translators Never Die. It was about a professional translator in Toronto who was in his eighties and still working. I expressed surprise that he'd gone on for so long. He replied, "One of the good things about translation is that you can go on doing it to an advanced age."

 

I myself continued translating routine stuff into my early eighties. When I gave up it wasn’t because I couldn’t translate but because I found it too tiring. Fatigue is an important factor in old-age behaviour.

 

Now comes news from India, that country of literary translation par excellence, which raises the bar. It’s about Aditya Narayan Dhairyasheel or A.N.D. Haksar. Since he retired 30 years ago, Haksar, who is based in Delhi and is now nearing 90, has spent hours translating Sanskrit works into English, to make them accessible to more readers.

“His most recent translation, Anthology of Humorous Sanskrit Verses (see below) features 200 hasya or humorous verses drawn from various works of Sanskrit literature ranging from the millennia-old Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata to compilations from the 13th and 14th centuries.”

No mean feat.

Haksar was formerly a career diplomat and ambassador to Portugal and Yugoslavia. He therefore belongs to a particular class of literary translators, people who have retired after distinguished careers and then taken up translation as native translators. Another is my good friend the Tamil translator Prabha Sridevan, who was a high court judge in another life. She has contributed to this blog (and for more about her, enter prabha in the Search box.)

 

At this point we can venture a hypothesis. It’s that mutatis mutandis there’s no age limit to the ability to translate. It may continue unto death. ‘All other things being equal’ because translating depends on other cognitive abilities in addition to the core translating ability itself. Simultaneous interpreting requires a very fast rate of processing that slows down with age. Consecutive interpreting requires a good short-term memory. All translating requires a good memory for words and names. And so on.

 

But survival doesn’t mean unimpaired.

 

We have long known, since the research on aphasics by Michel Paradis at McGill University in the 1970s, that a linguistic upset can lead to surprisingly aberrant behaviour in translating. But how about degenerations that are more typical of old age such as dementia and Alzheimers? There’s plenty of scope here for a thesis. Or for several theses.

 

Sources

A.N.D. Haksar. Anthology of Humorous Sanskrit Verses. Delhi: Penguin Random House India; May 2022.

 

Pankaj Tripathi. Our ancient humour deserves an audience: Translator A.N.D. Haksar. Global Circulate, 20 June 2022.

Michel Paradis et al. Alternate antagonism with paradoxical translation behavior in two aphasic patients. Brain and Language, vol. 15, no 1, pp. 55-69.

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A. N. D. Haksar

Aging and Translating

Recently a student asked for a copy of an old article of mine, The Difference Between Natural and Professional Translation. You can tell it’s old because it uses professional translation where today I would call it expert translation. Professional translation is expert translation done for money. However, I was drawn to reread the article; and having plenty of time to think during the Spanish lockdown, I wondered what differences might be added to those already mentioned in the article. One such difference is age.


Natural translation begins, we know from Ronjat (see References), as soon as child bilinguals can converse meaningfully, which is typically around age 3. On the other hand there are few expert or professional translators younger than 20, the age at which they start to get translation degrees or take the exams of the professional associations. Of course the older age of the latter can be readily explained by the education, knowledge of the world and cognitive maturity needed.  But the result is that for about 15 years of life a vast amount of everyday translating takes place that is almost all natural translation. “Almost” because there are some exceptions: for example the supervised school children who take part in the UK’s Young Interpreter movement that has often been mentioned in this blog; or the secondary school language students who compete in the European Commission’s annual competition. But those are islands in a sea of natural translation.
  
Now let’s look at the other end of life. A great many salaried professional translators cease work in their sixties because of their employers’ retirement policies. Yet there are also many, especially freelancers, who go on until much later. I have known a few expert freelancers, myself included, who were still working professionally into their eighties. I remember the surprise I felt many years ago when I met the first of these in Toronto. Yet even these survivors fade from the scene by 90, if they are lucky enough to live so long. In my own case it was for two reasons: one was that satisfactory professional translating demands not only high quality but also a cost-efficient and steady rate of output, and I was getting slow; and the other was that translating is tiring.

Freelance professional interpreters tend to fade away sooner than the translators of writings, usually by their mid-seventies, doubtless because interpreting demands faster speed and is more stressful. There's an amusing story listed on my Academia page about a conference interpreter who worked at the Olympic Games in his seventies, but it was exceptional: see My Greek Interpreter in References.

Literary translators follow the same timeline as either professionals or experts according to whether they are paid or not, although most of them are advanced native translators (i.e., self-taught from examples).

Teachers of translation likewise follow the timeline of professional translators; indeed most of them are professional.

As for late-age natural translation, there is a mention in this blog of a natural translator, a lady at a dinner party, in her seventies (see References); but in general there is little information. We can only speculate that it continues as long as the bilingual remains compos mentis.

So much for the age limits, but it tells us nothing about what happens in between them. Surely the natural translator at, say, five isn’t the same translator at ten or fifteen. In the case of expert translators, surely experience has an effect. There are organisations like the government of Canada that rank their translators and interpreters by seniority. But it always seemed to me an aberration that freelance professional conference interpreters just out of training are traditionally paid the same as ones with twenty years of experience.

Thus we know quite a lot about very young natural translators and there is a window of observation of expert translators around twenty, though the universities don’t publish the ages of their graduates and the professional associations don't list those of their members. That leaves big gaps to fill.

To sum up,

1.      Natural translation begins about age 3 and continues to the end of life, which in Western Europe averages about 80: a span of nearly 80 years.

2.       Expert translation begins at about 20 and continues steady into old age: roughly 60 years.

3.       Professional translation begins slightly later and tails off beyond 65: about 40 years.The difference in longevity is one of the reasons for distinguishing between profesional and expert translation.

These are big differences. Of course they are only rough guesses. They tell us nothing about the effects of language proficiency, cognitive development and world experience at different ages and in different contexts. I leave all that to others. It would be helpful if researchers always recorded the age of their subjects.


References

Jules Ronjat. Le développement du langage observé chez un enfant bilingue [Language development in a bilingual child]. In French. Paris: Champion, 1913. 155 p. Available online by clicking here or at https://archive.org/details/ledveloppement00ronjuoft.

Brian Harris. The difference between natural and professional translation. Canadian Modern Language Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 1977. Click HERE.

Translatology. Natural translation has no age limit. Unprofessional Translation, 27 October 2010. Click HERE.

Brian Harris. My Greek Interpreter. 2016. Click HERE.

Image
Source: Pinterest.