Lane Greene

Globally Speaking

Podcast 008

Why Don’t Journalists Use Professional Translators?

A Conversation with Lane Greene.

RBHi, this is Renato Beninatto.

MSAnd this is Michael Stevens.

RBToday we have a very special guest with us.

MSYes, one of the more esteemed guests we’ve had; a writer forThe Economist.

RBWell, it’s not every day that you get a famous journalist, an accomplished writer and, all in all, a very smart guy to talk to us.

MSYes. But what does he know about language? That’s the question!

RB So, Lane why don’t you tell us about yourself, who you are and just a brief introduction like two or three lines that you would write about you?

LGOkay. My name is Robert Lane green, people call me Lane and I am an editor at the Economist in London where I also write the bi-weekly language column which is called Johnson, and I also cover the language issues in the science section of the magazine from time to time and other parts of the paper. I have been a keen language-learner myself like a lot of people in the translation industry over, basically, all of my adult life, so these issues are very close to my heart.

RBYou have written a couple of books about language, but you are the antithesis to the classic joke that the definition of a person who only speaks one language is an American, you speak nine languages, or did you learn another one since we last met?

LGNo, I decided to slow down on adding new ones because I realised there’s a lot of holes and depth to be added to the ones I’ve already worked on so I’m going to try to build those up for a little while yet before I take on something new.

MSLane, what drew you into this?

LGIt was just high school Spanish, just that simple, I never had international exposure, never had any international exposure, never had left the United States; suburban family in the American South and it just was the one class that just kind of tickled me and I don’t know why but I just seemed to do well in tests an quizzes without working terribly hard. I just kind of reached out to it, just wanted that input and wanted to soak it up; it was like a puzzle, like some people like crosswords, I’d never been a crossword guy, for whatever it’s worth, but I just loved trying to puzzle out how Spanish was put together, which is so different from how English is put together. Then, I just added German in college and added and Portuguese, and then I added French, and I just kept going, I couldn’t stop. I’m a strange one in that way.

MSAlso, you have this passion for languages and you’re very much in the details with it but I’ve even heard you self-describe, others have said this about you, when you write about language you write from a meta view, you’re writing about the bigger story.

LGYes, I like writing about the things people say and think about language. I don’t know why I got into that but because I’m not a translator industry professional in that sense, in your sense and I’m not an academic linguist so I’m not doing original research on changing vowels in the Great Lakes region or the theoretical syntax of the Chompskyan school of linguistics. I like language, fascinated by the individual questions like the changing use of whom over time, onthe subjunctive, but I also like and am fascinated about how people think about it and I guess what some people don’t know about me is I have a Political Science degree and a Master’s.

So, I come to it from a sort of how do people organize themselves into groups and how do they make decisions as groups and individuals. And, one of the ways you signal how you think about the world is the language group you choose to join, not only the Portuguese speaking world or the English speaking world but are you one of those English speakers who insists on whom and insists on saying “it is I” instead of “it’s me”. What motivates those choices really fascinates me. So, that was the impetus behind my book, You Are What You Speak—why do people choose the sort of language tribes that they do, what’s behind that?

MSYou seem to also have a very generous perspective when you come to language; you use one description that language is like a dance.

LGYeah, it really is a two-person thing; to be ornery and say “you’re doing it wrong” is like telling your dance partner “knock that off”. Well, you’re not going to get dates and names on your dance card if you do that over and over again; so, it’s just no fun. And, because I think language is so interesting, it’s so fascinating I can talk about it all day. Just the sort of red in the face kind of attitude towards it doesn’t do anything for me.

RBAnd you work for The Economist, one of the most respected publications in the world, one of the most considered, unbiased, fact-based – and I’m not talking about the blog only - how is language relevant inside The Economist because you report on issues from all over the world; you have publications in China and different languages also, how does that permeate the day-to-day activities at The Economist?

LGI think we have in the order of 16 bureaus around the world at this point, maybe give or take one or two and a few of them are in the US but the rest of them are outside the English-speaking world primarily. There’s Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, several in China, several in India, and so on, and most of the correspondents are expected to learn the language of the country they’re covering, to the extent that they can.

Now, I say that but some of those journalists will be doing almost all reporting in the country’s language. If you’re in France and you’re a reporter you’re really expected to speak French with your sources. Maybe the occasional show-offy banker in France will insist on showing you his fluent English but most of our correspondents will be in the language of the country. And it’s quite hard to get your language, whatever it be, fluent enough, fast enough to carry on a lively, sometimes confrontational, discussion with someone when you’re on the back foot using a second language, but people are expected to try it.

In the cases of some of the hard languages, and I’m thinking of China here particularly, not all of our writers will be doing all of their work in Chinese, they’ll bring a translator, they’ll have English versions of their documents that they use for research, and so forth. So, not every one of our journalists gets totally fluent because it can take a very, very long time to get as far as you need to be in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and some of the others.

RBBut you have some strong opinions about how publications use, or don’t use, translators.

LGYes. It’s interesting. While the spoken language is seen as important, you’re quite expected to be able to sit down and have a conversation with someone. So, you either learn the language or you might take an interpreter in the spoken role. It’s really not that common to seek out and really immerse yourself in documents and written matter in the foreign language and that’s always struck me as kind of odd. It’s, either you find English translations that are done by the institution producing the original or you just call an expert and ask them to summarize it for you. But, it does not seem to be an instinct of most journalists to get written material translated when they need it.

RBIt is something I’ve been observing for many years; I have a sense that especially for breaking news they use young journalists and they get AP or Reuters news flashes and they do a rough translation of what’s going on. Very often you have very, very wrong translations in the first news that’s coming out.

MSSo, there’s wrong translation that is a result of that. What are some of the impacts of this lack of ability to research in the native language from your perspective?

LGI try to tell monolingual English speakers just to do the brief thought experiment, which is imagine you’re a French person in America and you can’t speak English; you can’t talk to the cab driver; you can’t talk to the man on the street; and you can’t read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. How successfully do you think you could…but, you do have very friendly French/English interpreter who walks around and, at your request, with a time delay and the loss of nuance and all, you do have a nice interpreter who helps you out every time you ask him to. Do you think you would be able to cover the United States and all of its complexity? The answer is obviously, no, right?

So, if you’re in Brazil you really want to be knowing not just some of the basics of what’s happening, but you want to know the meta-conversation about what’s happening; you want to say “these are how the papers are covering the latest scandal, the latest impeachments, the latest…

MSThe latest part of the Olympic thing that’s not done.

LGYes, and so you want to know what Sao Paulo and global are saying because it gives you a sense of where the goalposts are in the country. So, you really want to be able to pick up and read a paper. And most people, in some of those countries we do that. Like I said, our man in Sao Paulo is quite good in Portuguese by now but in other countries we don’t expect it as a minimum.

MSYou wrote an article that we want to highlight for folks for TAUS, the TAUS Review, covering this exactly right, how rarely journalism is translated.

LGMhm. And in that article, we can go ahead and concede that not every journalist is going to know every language they need to know. Some people are working in London and cover a sectoral issue like, healthcare or something like that, the environment. And, they can’t know all the countries of the world’s languages but it will happen, sometimes, that a piece of copy will come your way that is not in English.

Now, as it happens, say you’re covering the environment, most of the stuff you need will be in English, the scientific bodies, the NGOs, produce a lot of their primary stuff in English,but we can just posit that sometimes it won’t be and most of the reports I know, their instinct would be to say “is there an official English translation of this” or just skip it and say “it obviously doesn’t matter. If it wasn’t done in English, I’ll find something that was.” But, it does not seem to be their instinct to turn to the translation industry.

RBYes and that’s the interesting part because there is a lot of bias in reporting according to the language. I remember, clearly, during the Iraq war I was listening to the news in the United States and I was reading the news in other countries online and they were completely different and I kept talking to my wife and she wouldn‘t understand what was the difference. So, then, I subscribed to the French television and the perspective from outside the United States was completely different and she was shocked at how a French show could have people from 20 countries including Arab countries and Israel and the US in a show that lasted three hours without advertising to talk about the real issues. These are things that don’t happen here in the United States so there is this element of bias also that is compounded by the fact that the language in which the information is reported conveys some kind of world view.

MSAnd how does budget influence the instincts of journalists with this? You say they just skip the article and don’t consider translation is that because there’s only so much that they’re getting paid for each article and to hire a translator would diminish what they make on it?

LGWell, if you’re a freelancer that would be your calculation depending on your arrangement with the publication. I’m a staffer and always have been, so it’s hard for me to say how freelancers make their decisions but sometimes, depending on your contract, you can say that any expenses are paid by the commissioning publication so your fee is what your fee is and then your travel and translation and all those things are on top.

In the case of staff, think about this, we fly people around the world all the time. We’re buying $1,000 plane tickets to send people across the Atlantic and Pacific on a regular basis; and we put them in hotels in New Yorks and Londons that costs hundreds of dollars per night; and we pay expenses for all kinds of journalism. In this context, translation of brief pieces that might be useful wouldn’t be an unthinkable crazy charge. I mean, we have a catered lunch on Wednesdays, we have people take cabs home if they work past a certain hour at night; we pay for lots of things that make our lives and our journalism better.

So it’s not… everything is constrained by budgets right now, this is just in the nature of budgeting; everything that’s an expense is not part of the profit pool but it just doesn’t seem to have become habit to consider this a worthwhile expense.

MSYes, that may be a harder thing to change than just a budget line.

LGYes, it’s a cultural change. It’s changing habits.

RBThat’s a challenge for the industry because I think the message you share with us is, essentially, that there is a lack of awareness of the ability and availability of good quality translation. What's the role of machine translation in this process? How is Google Translate a friend or a foe for a journalist?

LGGoogle Translate has obviously got lots of pitfalls. It will give you a rough gist but sometimes the gist can be 180 degrees wrong by Google Translate mistranslating or not catching a polarity item like not or never, always or isn’t, or something like that, that switches the meaning of the sentence completely. That can happen. And then, of course, there are just the many things that just get turned into a hash by Google Translate. I have to say, I think Google Translate can be amazing sometimes but it just produces errors that can vary from trivial to very serious in almost every translation.

So you have to just use it with caution and that means having a meta-linguistic knowledge about what Google Translate is, what it can do, recognising the limits of your own ability to judge how good a job Google Translate has done; if you don’t know the source language and you’re translating in English, you know absolutely nothing of the source language, then you’re in trouble because even if you see some grammatical English coming out the output side you have no idea if that was good; all you can see is that it seems to be grammatical English.Now, if what comes out is a hash, of course, you can say “well, that’s garbled and I can’t use that” but if it seems to be grammatical then you might just say, “hey, nifty, that’s perfect” not knowing if Google Translate hasn’t missed something quite crucial and I’ve seen it do that.

RBI have a saying that translation is only news when it’s bad.

LGThat’s right, it’s like the referee in a soccer match…

RBExactly; a hashtag that I use every once in a while because that’s the only time that you see translation in the news. Is there a way that you think we could make the journalistic environment more aware of language issues in reporting?

LGWell, language issues, I think journalists are quite taken with language, they like the subject, they write about trends in the English language eagerly; those who write about foreign languages like to take their chance to write about trends in French, Portuguese or whatever country they’re in, but the thing is that because there are very few, and close to zero journalists in the world – I’m one of the very few – who actually write about language regularly, the analysis can be very superficial, very kind of summer trend piece rather than the fine grain feel you get from working with an issue over the course of years.

We don’t expect that an environmental correspondent can just wade into the climate change debate, dash off a piece after five interviews and nail it, but that’s how we very often, too often, treat language because I think the idea is if it’s physics, we know that we’re not physicists so we don’t try to do that but because we can use language we think that we know almost all that we need to know about describing language, including its interior workings, and that’s the stuff of linguistics which is somewhere between a social science and a hard science depending on the sub-field and it really does require long-term knowledge by paying attention to the field over time, getting to know sources, getting to know the debates, getting to know their contours; and we just don’t pay very many journalists out there in the world to do that.