Back translation considered harmful

I recently read a book on international business that recommends the practice of reverse translation after having a document translated, paying a second translator to translate the translation back into the original language to check accuracy. Although many translation companies do offer this service, (also known as back translation), most experienced translators agree that it does more harm than good overall. What back translation amounts to is a misguided attempt to get around the need for trust in a translators professional judgment, based on a deep-rooted misconception of the nature of language itself. The assumption is that the meaning of a text exists as a sort of platonic ideal, independent of its actual expression in specific words, that can be transferred back and forth from one language to another essentially unchanged. This is a false assumption that obscures the real issues involved in assessing translation quality. Of course, if the client is personally proficient in both languages, he can judge for himself whether the translation is adequate. But even the greatest polyglots among us have this level of proficiency in only a handful of the worlds thousands of languages. For all the rest, assessing translation quality remains a surprisingly difficult challenge. Back translation appears to restore the clients ability to judge the original translations quality for himself, but this is an illusion. The more superficial risk of this approach is that of false positives. A client who finds an error in a back translation may assume that it resulted from a mistake by the original translator, when in fact it could just as easily have been introduced during the back-translation process. But the more important point is that back translation is utterly unsuited to identifying any but the crudest errors and infelicities, and doesnt even catch all of those. One probably apocryphal example is an article about spectator sports that was reportedly translated into Spanish with the word fan, in the sense of someone who roots for a team, rendered as ventilador a mechanical fan for blowing air. A client relying solely on back translation for quality control would be none the wiser. An advocate of back translation might object that the back-translator would surely have an opportunity to point out the error in a comment. I agree, but would add that its really only the comments, and not the back translation itself, that provide any genuine value in assessing the quality of the original translation. Pure semantic errors of the ventilador type are actually rare in the work of all but the most inexperienced translators. They occur mainly when a translator gets out of his technical depth and lacks the time or resources to research terminology in a documents field. Errors of this type may or may not lend themselves to reproduction in the original source language in a

back translation. But word-for-word or term-for-term mapping between one language and another is not really the issue in professional-level translation quality assessment. The essence of an experienced translators skill is in creating a document that effectively performs its function to instruct, inform, persuade, etc. in the target-language environment. Done with skill, translation is a creative act, not a mechanical process. Its not at all uncommon for an experienced translator to put more care into a document than the original author. (One translator I know actually uses the slogan Translations better than the original.) The problem with most of the many, many poor translations Ive seen in my 14 years in the business is that theyre only half-translated. The target-language words are there, but the rhetorical conventions and discursive structures are still those of the source language. The reader finds these documents awkward, irritating, difficult to understand, and unpleasant (or unintentionally funny) to read because they dont conform to the patterns of how ideas are expressed and texts composed in the target language. These are subjective factors, but theyre very real and always present. And theyre all but impossible to capture in back translation. If there really are serious problems with the original translation, the back-translator finds himself in the peculiar situation of being expected to produce a bad translation the better he exercises his skill in creating an effective target-language document, the more he undermines the purpose of the job he was asked to do. In fact, since the problem with the translated document is that it still retains the sound and feel of the original language, producing a back translation that reads smoothly is actually relatively easy. To truly reproduce the effect of an awkward, foreign-sounding translation in a back translation would be as difficult as it is pointless. It would be much quicker and easier (read cheaper) for a reviewer to skip the back translation and simply tell the client that the translation is awkward and sounds wrong in the target language. And/or for the client to pay another skilled professional to revise and polish the translation, not produce a degraded sibling of the original source document. This sort of peer review process has always been a standard part of Blue Danubes services. Back translation gives the client an illusion of being able to judge quality for himself, but in fact it reveals at least as much about the abilities of the back-translator as it does about the original translation. Replacing back translation with a peer review process uncovers the awkward fact that the client cannot avoid depending on the professional judgment of at least one translator somewhere in the revision chain. People dont generally seem reluctant to trust the judgment of doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. But translating is the Rodney Dangerfield of professions translators dont get no respect. Of course translators dont necessarily have the same level of training or go through

the rigorous certification processes of other professions, and unfortunately its all too easy for unqualified people with some limited bilingual background to hang out their shingles. So knowing whose judgment to rely on is a difficult problem in its own right. But the illusory confidence provided by the practice of back translation is harmful to both the profession and the clients own interests.