How do you say ‘lowlife’ in another language?
De la difficulté de traduire Donald Trump.
Donald Trump s’exprime beaucoup, par tous les moyens. Le 45ème président des Etats-Unis est plus particulièrement un avide utilisateur de Twitter où ses messages, de 140 caractères maximum, détonnent. Loin du politiquement correct, Trump semble s’exprimer comme il pense, avec un champ lexical surprenant. Comment traduire précisément sa pensée sans faire de contresens ?
His syntax is often broken, the meaning of his comments is sometimes unclear, and he is prone to rambling, repetition and exaggeration. President Donald Trump’s language is an annoyance to some, a balm to others. But for one group, it’s something else — a professional hazard. 2. If native English speakers are having trouble processing Trump-speak, think of the challenges facing foreign translators and interpreters, who must grapple with the president’s verbal idiosyncrasies and make them understandable in another language.
DRIVING TRANSLATORS CRAZY
3. “There are several things that make an interpreter’s life easy,” said Christiane Abel, who teaches French translation and interpretation at the Middlebury Institute of International Stud- 1. broken ici, approximatif, imparfait / comment commentaire, observation / to be prone to être enclin à / to ramble divaguer, parler longuement de manière désorganisée / annoyance agacement / balm baume; ici, soulagement / hazard danger, risque. 2. native speaker personne de langue maternelle / to have trouble doing sth avoir du mal/des difficultés/ peiner à / to process traiter; ici, interpréter / Trumpspeak langage/façon de s'exprimer du 45e président des États-Unis / to face être confronté/faire face à / foreign étranger / translator traducteur / to grapple with être aux prises avec /
idiosyncrasy singularité, particularité / to make, made, made ici, rendre.
3. to drive, drove, driven sb crazy rendre fou qn / several plusieurs /
ies at Monterey and is on the U.S. State Department’s roster of contract interpreters. “When people finish their sentences … when the syntax is well-structured … when the speaker starts speaking and you kind of understand where the person is going, you can kind of decode the underlying thought.”
4. Not so with Trump. The new leader of the free world is driving translators crazy. “He has the ‘Apprentice’ personality thing going on,” said Alessandro Duranti, former dean of the division of social sciences in the UCLA College of Letters and Science, whose expertise includes language as a cultural practice, and political discourse. “He has a certain use of hyperbole. He actually insults people. He calls people ‘dummy,’ ‘lowlife,’ ‘fraud.’ He talks in a way that is not the typical political speech. When there’s a choice, he goes for whatever is the most colloquial.”
MINEFIELDS
5. All of those attributes create minefields for those translating his words. Chinese interpreters struggle with Trump’s inclination toward hyperbole, according to Mandarin speakers. For example, “huge,” “enormous” and “tremendous” all translate into the same word in Chinese: “da,” or “big.”
6. “Sometimes the translation is much more restrained than the original because the words he chooses are very ostentatious,” said Yin Hao, a graduate student at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, who has made a hobby of translating comments by U.S. politicians and posting them online. 7. Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, increasingly fills with questions about the meaning of terms like “no nothing”, a reference to Trump’s tweet: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA — NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
8. Trump’s sarcasm can also pose a challenge for Mandarin speakers, according to Yin. A Taiwanese news agency misunderstood a tweet about the controversial phone call between Trump and Taiwan’s leader after Trump’s election victory, Yin said.
9. “Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call,” Trump wrote. The tone was one of sarcasm and indignation, but the Taiwanese news organization thought he was expressing regret, Yin said.
10. Duranti, the UCLA professor, noted that simple words and phrases such as “nice” — which Trump uses frequently as a sort of exclamation — can be difficult to translate into other languages, because “it covers a huge semantic field.”
11. David Quinto-Pozos, who directs the American Sign Language program at the University of Texas and is president of Mano a Mano, a national organization for Spanish-English-ASL interpreters, said that Trump’s use of terms such as “bad dudes” (“We have some protesters who are bad dudes, they have done bad things”) can cause challenges for signers. “ASL doesn’t have a sign for ‘dude,’ and Spanish doesn’t have a good word either,” Quinto-Pozos said.
12. “What is particularly challenging … is sometimes you get these words that you would not expect from someone who was running for president, was president-elect and is now president.”
TRUMP WILL BE TRUMP
13. Beyond the problem of squeamishness, there is the question of register — determining the tone, decorum and feeling of what is being expressed. Simply put, some translators give Trump’s words a dignity and clarity that they might not have in English, because they can’t quite wrap their minds around a president who speaks the way he does.
14. “What we usually teach our students is that when you interpret in French you use a higher register in the language,” said Abel, the Middlebury Institute professor, who said at some stage her students would be trained to practice on Trump’s speeches. “If you interpret word for word in French it’s going to sound really colloquial,” Abel added. “I think there is the risk of cleaning it up,” Quinto-Pozos said. “Especially for a foreign market that might not expect certain language from a person in this position, it does get cleaned up.”
State Department équivalent du ministère des Affaires étrangères / roster liste / sentence phrase / speaker orateur / kind of en quelque sorte, plus ou moins / where
the person is going où la personne veut en venir / underlying sous-jacent, implicite. 4. not so mais pas / thing ici, caractéristique / going on en cours / former ancien / dean doyen / college université / expertise expérience (technique), compétences / certain ici, caractéristique, (bien) particulier / actually réellement / dummy crétin (aussi, factice) / lowlife voyou / way façon, manière / typical habituel, conventionnel / to go, went, gone for ici, opter pour / colloquial familier, informel. 5. minefield terrain miné; ici, situation problématique, semée d'embûches/aux difficultés multiples, casse-tête / to struggle peiner, éprouver des difficultés / inclination penchant / according to d'après, selon / huge énorme, considérable / tremendous phénoménal, immense. 6. restrained réservé, modéré, mesuré, "soft" / graduate student étudiant de troisième cycle.
7. increasingly de plus en plus / to fill with être inondé de / "no nothing" rien du tout / to have nothing to do with n'avoir rien à voir avec / deal accord / loan prêt. 8. to pose représenter, s'avérer (être) / news agency agence de presse / to misunderstand, misunderstood, misunderstood mal comprendre/ interpréter. 9. billion milliard. 10. to note remarquer, constater / phrase expression / such as tel(les) que / nice plaisant, agréable, sympathique / field champ. 11. dude gars, mec, type / signer ici, interprète en langue des signes / either ici, non plus. 12. to expect s’attendre à /
to run, ran, run ici, se présenter, être candidat (élection) / president-elect président élu, titre du président des États-Unis entre son élection et son investiture. 13. Trump will be Trump les gens ne devraient pas être surpris lorsque Trump agit de la sorte car cela fait partie intégrante de sa personnalité (réf. à boys will be boys ça, c'est bien les hommes) / beyond au-delà de / squeamishness trait de caractère consistant à être facilement choqué et particulièrement minutieux, pruderie / decorum convenance, registre approprié / simply put autrement dit, pour être clair / quite tout à fait, complètement / to wrap one's mind around sth se faire à (l'idée que), saisir, appréhender. 14. at some stage à un moment donné / to train former / to practice s'entraîner/exercer à / to sound sembler, paraître / to clean up assainir; ici, rendre plus acceptable/ moins vulgaire/familier / especially surtout, particulièrement / position poste, fonction.