Everything is connected

I started the year as I meant to go on with an incredible weekend spent at the EA Sustain festival in Colchester. It was an intense day, covering a broad range of topics (for more details, see this month’s CPD roundup). But one message kept coming up throughout the day: everything is connected.

This is one of those statements that’s either so profound as to require a lifetime of contemplation to truly internalise, or so trite as to be basically meaningless. I personally believe it’s the former, and it struck a chord with me because I do a lot of different things and wear quite a few different hats, and it can sometimes feel like I’m a bit ‘all over the place’. What I’m coming to realise, however, is that there are common threads and ties running through and between every single one of them, reflecting a common spark of purpose. And that’s what this blog will hopefully tease out.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go

I suppose we should start with the obvious. Like most of the translators I know, there are multiple strings to my bow. I normally introduce myself as a translator, but that’s really a shorthand for ‘I work with languages for a living’. Because the reality is that translation is a complex and multifaceted skill composed of multiple sub-skills. The European Master’s in Translation does a good job of elucidating this in its Competence Framework, so I won’t attempt to replicate their work here. But suffice it to say, being a translator means, amongst other things, being a good writer and having an excellent command of your target language.

Being able to write well, to communicate clearly, is one of the most underrated skills out there, and also one of the most transferrable. It’s what enables me to also act as an editor and copywriter in fields related to the ones I translate in. But these other services also feed back into my translation. One of the stages of my ‘standard’ translation process (no. 5 of 6, if you’re wondering) is monolingual proofreading. What really happens in this stage is that I take everything I have learned from editing other people’s work and apply it to my own. In other words, there’s a synergy there – translating makes me a better editor, and editing makes me a better translator.

Then there’s the teaching. I have taught translation at a few different universities in London, but primarily UCL. Historically, teaching has been presented as a one-way process, with knowledge being conveyed from teacher to student, but that’s not been my experience. Of course, I set the texts we cover, wherever possible tailored to the students’ interests and areas of expertise, and my job is ultimately to lay down some guiderails, within which they can experiment freely. But the fact is that the best way of learning how to do something is to teach it. I have undoubtedly become a better translator since I started teaching. For one thing, it forces you to slow down and really think about other, equally valid, ways of translating the same sentence. Pretty much every session, a student will come up with a solution that I wouldn’t have thought of, and it will generally work.

And more importantly, if I say their proposal doesn’t work, I have to be able to explain why it doesn’t work. We have all had the experience of having a translation returned to us covered in someone else’s changes. In some cases, these changes may have even been made by a client who is not a native speaker of the language. After a moment of deep breathing and counting to ten, the first step is always to decide if the changes proposed are incorrect, preferential or demonstrably better than your original proposal. The line between ‘better’ and ‘preferential’ can be tricky, especially if the reviser is more familiar with a particular client’s style (or is the client), but a fairly sure-fire way of checking is to take, say, five of the changes that you don’t agree with, and ask the reviser why they made them. A good reviser will have a good reason for making good changes. and they should be able to put into words what improvement is achieved by doing so. That’s my position at least, and it’s why the phrase “It just sounds better” is banned in my classroom, including for me.

When I give feedback on students’ work, I normally apply fundamentally the same criteria as I would when revising a colleague’s work. Because at the end of the day, trainee translators are aspiring to be my colleagues, and they need to be ready for that. Consequently, when I propose a change to their work, I have to be able to explain why I would make that change. Normally it’s fairly obvious – the punctuation is wrong, they’ve slightly changed the emphasis in the sentence, there’s a more idiomatic option available, or sometimes they’ve just outright misunderstood. Sometimes it’s a little trickier, and it forces me to interrogate why I think “It just sounds better”, and there is no better way of learning to eliminate the desire to make preferential changes than rigorously interrogating your own thinking and approaches. It works the other way as well – when I revise other translators’ work, I strive to only make changes that I would be able to justify if asked. And that means that when my work is changed, I have the tools necessary to challenge those changes, where I think they are unnecessary.

This may sound belligerent. I don’t mean it to. All I mean to say is that we are supposed to be experts at what we do, and experts should be able to talk amongst themselves clearly and in detail about their area of expertise. This, I think, is one of the things that marks professional translators out from enthusiastic (or simply hustling?) amateurs. I’ve got a lot better at it since I started teaching, and I think it has, in turn, made me a better teacher. And if you don’t have access to a class of aspiring translators to teach, try joining a revision club – the process is very similar.

This is a fairly superficial analysis, of course, but hopefully it illustrates how the different things I get paid to do nourish and bolster each other.

Then there’s the “side” projects

The scare quotes are very deliberate here because these can actually take up quite a lot of my working day. I’m referring to the various networks, projects and committees that I make an active contribution to, but don’t get paid for. These include, for example, Source2Target, the podcast I co-create with a couple of colleagues, designed to support current translation students and prospective translators. I’ve already mentioned the power of teaching as a tool of reflection, and the same applies here – I get to spend time considering what exactly new translators need to know, and the topics we discuss are often a powerful reminder of the core principles of what it means to be a professional translator. It also feeds into how I go about teaching my students in a more formal setting whilst also, I hope, contributing to the long-term development of the profession as a whole… which in turn feeds back into my own career development, which feeds back into the podcast… and so on and so forth.

I also help run the East Anglia Network of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. The network’s full aims are listed on the website if you’re interested (and if you would like to join, we’d be very happy to have you!), but the clue is in the name. We work to improve connectivity within the translation and interpreting community in the region, whether that’s translators and interpreters, students, universities or the business community more widely. And that means thinking about and sharing knowledge and experience and supporting each other to be the best translators and interpreters that we can be.

We all bring our own skills to the network – I personally make use of my experience in the university world and translator training to help engage with the students. I’m also the treasurer, which helps me keep my bookkeeping skills fresh. This is really important to me, because finance is an area I translate in, and whilst the documents I normally work on these days are generally more strategic in nature, every so often a sentence will crop up that only makes sense if you have a basic understanding of double-entry accounting, so it’s a win-win: I get to keep my knowledge fresh, and I bring a better-than-average understanding of looking after money to the role.

There are others I could mention here, but this is starting to sound like a recitation of my CV, so I’ll move on. But hopefully I’ve got my point across!

And finally there’s the hobbies

Even here, I find the line a little difficult to draw. If you’ve ever visited my blog before, you’ll know that I love my allotment, and I love to use it as a tool for understanding the subjects I translate about. Wherever possible, I try to integrate the knowledge I gain about sustainable food production and agriculture into the way I grow things on the plot, just as experimenting with those ideas on the ground (no pun intended) helps me to understand and communicate the ideas. This isn’t always easy – economies of scale can be a barrier here when it comes to things like crop rotation, but my work and my hobby definitely feed into each other.

The same can be said of the voluntary work I do for the Chelmsford local group of the Essex Wildlife Trust. Part of my job is to help organise the group’s talks, and so when I attend various CPD events, I’m always on the lookout for potential ideas or speakers that might be appropriate for talks. And in the other direction, hardly a month goes by when one of the talks does not feature in my monthly CPD round-ups (during the autumn and winter at least – during the warmer months, we swap our talks for walks around local preservation sites).

And then there’s my crafty side. The latest ‘hat’ I added to my collection was becoming treasurer of the Mid-Essex Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers. Making things has always been a passion of mine, driven by a desire to understand how things are made. I started knitting whilst at university, and this has gradually ‘worked up’ into an interest in all things textile. It’s an important source of creativity for me, but it’s more than that – the process of turning fibre into a useful product is fascinating and even inspirational. According to one speaker at EA Sustain, fibre-based packaging (e.g. cardboard, made from wood fibre) is some of the most sustainable out there because it can be broken down and processed into something useful again a huge number of times – far more than plastic at any rate.

This is something I’m putting into action at the moment. I’m currently in the midst of turning a pillowcase of leftover scraps of yarn (or ‘thrums’ as they apparently called) into new yarn by un-plying, re-carding and re-spinning them. It’s a slow process, but infinitely better than them going into landfill, especially for acrylic yarns. I also recently made myself a literal hat primarily out of a yarn that I span from some sheep-fleece-based insulating packaging made by a company called Woolcool. In a truly circular economy, there is no such thing as waste, and I like to think I’m doing something useful here, and living out my ideals, even if only in a small way. And if you don’t approve of using animal fibre like wool or synthetic fibres like acrylic, there are other options – for example, did you know that the fibres in stinging nettle stems (like the ones that grow all around my allotment site) can be processed into thread? It’s quite a long-winded process, but not dissimilar from the process of turning flax into linen. It’s fully biodegradable, so great for use on the allotment as it can all go in the compost heap once you clear your runner beans, rather than having to disentangle everything.

There is a deeper point here as well – the ability to make things has at least two knock-on consequences. First, the ability to repair things, i.e. to keep them in use rather than replacing and buying new. At a very basic level, this might mean darning the elbow patches on your favourite coat, rather than scrapping the whole thing and getting a new one. Or it might mean recycling and repurposing them into something new, which was the topic of a talk given at my guild last year. And secondly, creating something useful yourself comes with the desire to maintain that object, to look after and cherish it. This is the exact opposite of the ‘buy cheap, replace soon’ hyper-consumerist model that has landed us in our present predicament. Going through the effort of making something, from as early on in the process as possible gives you a unique sense of the physicality of that object and the materials in it. It imbues the object with a value that no fast fashion item could ever replace, and it helps you see how easily that object could be reassembled into another, if we could only learn to see it as such.

That may have all got a little too deep, but hopefully it provides a snapshot of the fireworks that go off in my brain when I start reflecting on how everything is connected, including what I choose to devote my time to.

The point is…

Translators are very rarely one thing – we often straddle improbable combinations of worlds and experience, but this doesn’t mean we’re ‘jacks of all trades, masters of none’ or somehow fragmented. Far from it, we are the great synergists! We don’t just take your message from one language to another, we also bring everything we learn to bear on everything else and generate value by connecting seemingly disparate things. My daily life is a cornucopia of work, projects and activities that seem disparate and dispersed but are really anything but. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.