The non-discourse around translation styles is fascinating to me.
As a career localization editor who is highly attuned to the nuances of a text’s register and tone, the way styles are approached by translation professionals always felt weird. Juvenile even, frankly.
Professionally, that song and dance is almost always performed upon a mountain of eggshells with the utmost care taken not to upset.
Someone’s style is never painfully dull, never unfit for a project, never too weird for the target audience, never incompatible with the rest of the team, never 𝒃𝒂𝒅.
”It just isn’t your cup of tea”.
Which is, uh, demonstrably false.
Would you say the same about writing?
Translation is writing—and writing is one of the most critiqued aspects of a work.
You cannot simply divorce the way a work is written from the experience of reading it. The writing either serves to enhance that experience or take away from it.
If a translation style alienates a project’s target audience, if it clashes with the source, if it requires hefty rewrites to amend, is it really worth accommodating?
With how translation styles are currently handled in localization projects, there’s no clear line between a style that’s a bit quirky and an active liability.
The are just as many objectively horrendous ways to translate as there are to write—and maybe it’s time to recognize that if we want higher standards.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.