Translation Can Be Fun

Translation Can Be Fun

www.linguesenzasforzo.org
I’ve basically been curious about almost everything, and I’ve found great pleasure and satisfaction in solving puzzles of any kind. Through translation and otherwise being involved with languages, I’ve been able to find enjoyment, even fun, at every turn, while at the same time earning enough money to live moderately comfortably and support my family. I’ve come to the conclusion that this attitude is, in fact, a key to success in translation. Let me tell you why. I was born to parents who had opposite views on languages: my father was a physicist and a mathematics teacher. He told us many times that the hardest part about getting his PhD was passing a German exam, which took him an entire year of diligent study. My mother, on the other hand, grew up in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona with many friends who were Navajo Indians, and this created in her an interest in all languages, which she pursued whenever she could – especially by making friends with people who spoke Spanish, but not hesitating to sign up for classes in French, Latin, and Greek when those opportunities arose. In this situation, I naturally developed interests in both science (especially mathematics) and languages as I grew up, and I have always tried to pursue both at the same time, not really knowing how to achieve that or what to do with such a combination, if I could manage it. My first memory of becoming interested in languages dates back to about age 5. In those days, during World War II, my father did a lot of secret work for the Navy that he wouldn’t talk about at home. One day, he wasn’t feeling well and stayed home from work. I took advantage of the rare chance to spend time alone with him and crawled into his bed. At one point, he uncharacteristically started telling me what he knew about languages, which wasn’t much. He mentioned that the Spanish word for “book” is “libro,” which is related to our English word “library.” That hit me like a bolt of lightning. Seeing that interest, my father found his old German textbook and dictionary and showed them to me. I was fascinated by the strange-looking Gothic letters. A few years later, I remember having a babysitter who happened to pick up my mother’s French textbook. The babysitter mentioned some word that meant the same as a two-word phrase in English, and I naïvely asked which parts of the French word corresponded to each of the two English words. I was amazed to find out that languages don’t work that way. Sometimes, I was able to attend Spanish classes with my mother, where I learned about accents on letters. Those were days when my mother was also studying Greek in her spare time. When she wasn’t using her book, I loved to look at it. I couldn’t understand much of it, but I learned the alphabet, at least, from it. I had a small stamp collection and learned about many more writing systems and languages used in foreign countries, including the astonishing fact that in Hungarian, you can have more than one accent in the same word, even on the same letter! It took me many years to find out how that works, but the question was always in the back of my mind while curiosity led me in other directions, too, such as astronomy, music, paleontology, history, geography, etc., for brief periods at various times. In junior high, I had my first foreign-language class, Spanish, which I loved greatly, especially those upside-down punctuation marks. Another memorable class was English. The teacher spoke with a British accent, even though he was American, having studied at Oxford. I learned from him both about the beauty of English and the incredible complexity of its grammar. Figuring out the structure of a sentence (“diagraming”) was just like solving a puzzle for me, and I was often the only one in class who could figure such problems out, though I turned out be slower than most students in reading, due to a mild form of dyslexia. In high school, I took almost every language class they offered: Spanish, French, and German, though not Latin, which I now regret skipping. I made up for that deficit later by studying my mother’s Latin grammar. I think no one else in that school ever took three different foreign languages. My physics and chemistry teachers, however, strongly encouraged me to study science in college, which I was able to do, because Caltech was in nearby Pasadena, California. I ended up majoring in mathematics at Caltech, but I kept taking all the language classes I could, especially Russian. I also had opportunities to take classes in the sciences from outstanding teachers. After three years of college, I was sent to Finland as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). Nowadays, LDS missionaries spend months learning the language before going to the country, but I went with only a few hours of introduction to the Finnish and a little book, Teach Yourself Finnish. Many Americans find learning Finnish to be extremely difficult, but it came to me easily. In some parts of Finland, the people also speak Swedish, and when I was assigned to the city of Vaasa, we had a Swedish-speaking landlady who was happy to teach me a little of her language. I had known for a long time that Finnish was related to Hungarian and Estonian, and I bought books on those languages and studied them when I had time. When I lived for a while in the city of Lahti, the caretaker of our chapel had as Estonian wife who helped me somewhat with her language. I still believe that Estonian is the most difficult language in the world, in spite of its closeness to Finnish, whose complex grammar has an almost mathematical structure. I didn’t meet any Hungarians till a few years later. After my mission, I returned to studying mathematics at Caltech, but I found that mathematics was getting to be less and less fascinating for me. After finishing my bachelor’s degree in math, I therefore decided to go to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City to study in the Linguistics Department. I didn’t even know what linguistics was when I applied, but that was name of the department that taught classes in Finnish and Hungarian. I quickly found out that linguistics is just the scientific study of all languages, and that was perfect more me. I eventually got two master’s degrees there, but never actually completed the PhD. Before going to Columbia, I had married another returned Finnish missionary, who happened to be from Germany. This led to one of my first experiences in translation, which involved some huge mistakes on my part, ones that I still find translators making frequently today. This was in 1964, the time of the New York World’s Fair. Many countries had pavilions there that displayed some of their treasures. The Vatican City brought Michelangelo’s statue “Pietà.” They wanted to have texts about it available in various languages, and they advertised in the newspaper for translators. I responded and was asked to translate a description of the statue into Spanish, French, and German. Having studied all those languages in high school, I felt qualified. I showed my German translation to my wife, who made some changes, but I had no Spanish- or French-speaking people at hand to show those translations to, though I could have found some easily. To my great surprise, I was informed that the pavilion organizers liked my German, but they said they couldn’t use my Spanish or French, and they even threatened to sue me. We eventually agreed that they would pay me for the German and not sue me over the others. At the World’s Fair, IBM had an exhibit on machine translation close to the Vatican Pavilion. It became my favorite place to visit. They had a computer that could translation from and to Russian, though not very fast and not very well. I thought maybe that’s what I should do for a career. Things turned out somewhat differently for me, but I always stayed as close to developments in machine translation as I could. After about four years at Columbia, I won a fellowship to study in Hungary, where I spent almost a year at the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen, where I was able to learn about all the languages related to Finnish and Hungarian. They had a tiny computer there, far too small to handle any language processing, but I enjoyed learning to program it at the lowest possible machine-language level, coding individually every action the computer should perform. That was like learning a new language for me, and I couldn’t get enough of it. The university I was studying at is located next door to a medical school. That turned out to be the best part of my experience in Hungary. Some of the doctors teaching there had written articles that they wanted to publish in English, and they invited me to translate them from Hungarian into English. From that, I learned not only a lot about translation, but also about medicine. I found that in addition to the joy of solving the language problems involved, there was also a great feeling of satisfaction in knowing that some of the results of my efforts at translating would eventually be of benefit to people suffering from various medical problems and the doctors treating them. I returned to Columbia to work on a PhD degree. At the same time, I worked in a few language-related jobs: editing Roget’s Thesaurus, teaching linguistics at Adelphi University, and teaching Hungarian at Columbia. One of my Hungarian students was the son of my first Hungarian teacher (!). While I was working on Roget’s Thesaurus, we encountered a difficulty in that our printer couldn’t handle all the foreign accents we needed. I found out that characters could be designed in any way we needed, bit by bit, using a digital matrix. This also became a fascinating theme for me in my future in languages. The main thing I learned from my teaching experiences was that I didn’t want to be a teacher. I found very few students who shared my passion for languages. Their standard response t

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