I got asked a while back by one of my apprentice sisters (thanks, Hessa!) about how I go about translating things. After sending her a gazillion messages talking about it, I figured a blog post would make sense in case others were curious. I have absolutely no pretensions to being a professional, but I do have a lot of translation experience due to my various language classes (Latin in high school and college, modern Hebrew in college, and assorted others I took for a short while). This, along with my background in linguistics, undoubtedly informs how I go about doing things.
Translating to English
This is by far the majority of my translation experience, especially with Latin, since very few people want things translated to Latin anymore. So I’ll start with that.
I’m currently translating a medieval music treatise (Ad noticiam iam musice artis intrare volentibus: Christo igitur Domino moduracionibus psallere volentibus) from Latin into English. It has been translated before, but into Czech, which I have absolutely zero knowledge of. I bought a copy of the transcription and Czech translation all the way from the Czech Republic after falling down this rabbit hole thanks to sourcing for my original choreography to a medieval Czech Christmas carol (blog post).
I am using a variety of sources for this translation, each of which helps with a different aspect.
- Wheelock’s Latin (6th edition): This is the textbook I used in Latin class in high school, which I snapped up when I found a hardcover copy at an estate sale. It’s really good for reminding me of all those ablative constructions I’ve forgotten about, and it has declension/conjugation tables and a vocabulary section in the back. It’s classical rather than medieval Latin, but the basics are still the same.
- Reading Medieval Latin: This is the textbook I used for my medieval Latin class in college. It has extracts from medieval Latin texts (which is why I bought a new copy last year, since I sold my original copy after the class was over), a survey of the grammatical and orthographical changes between classical and medieval Latin, and a small vocabulary section in the back. This one is incredibly valuable for when I get stuck on a word or grammatical form.
- Google Translate (yes, really): I use this mostly for words that don’t appear in either of the books. I could use a dictionary for this, but I gave my Latin dictionary to one of my brothers and haven’t gotten around to replacing it. I trust it very little for actual grammar, but it’s pretty good for checking what a single word means.
- Wiktionary: This is super useful for figuring out declensions and conjugations for words I’m not familiar with as well as making sure I’ve identified noun cases or verb tenses correctly. It’s also what I use to double-check Google Translate to make sure it hasn’t given me something totally absurd.
My sources for modern Hebrew are similar. (While I have only translated modern Hebrew into English, not medieval Hebrew, I believe there are books out there that I could consult.)
- Brandeis Modern Hebrew: This is the textbook from my Hebrew classes in college. It’s got all the introductory stuff you expect from a modern language textbook and handy verb tables in the back as well as some vocabulary.
- The New Bantam-Megiddo Hebrew and English Dictionary: I think I got this one because it was the most useful-looking of the Hebrew/English dictionaries at whatever bookstore I was looking in. It also has verb tables and so forth, in addition to having both Hebrew to English and English to Hebrew sections.
- Google Translate: Once again, for words my dictionary doesn’t have.
The first thing I do when translating is copy the text out onto the left half of a piece of graph paper (skipping lines). I mostly use graph paper because I have a lot of it sitting around that I don’t use, and because it has five lines to the inch where most ruled paper has four (I have very small handwriting). The space above each line is where I write the translation of each word or phrase.
I have been told a number of times by my various Latin teachers that starting with word meanings is the wrong way to go about translating and I should start with figuring out the grammatical structure, but I find this counterintuitive and more difficult so I don’t do it. (It is, admittedly, easier to get away with this translating prose than it is translating poetry, where words get shifted around for meter and suchlike all the time.) After looking up the various words and figuring out their meaning and case or tense, I use this knowledge to parse the grammatical structures of the sentence. For example, in translating the sentence “Nunc primo ad manum redeamus,” I translate the individual words and then assemble the sentence in order. “Redeamus” is clearly a first-person plural verb, and “ad manum” is clearly an accusative construction, so this is quite a grammatically simple sentence.
Once I’ve figured out the grammatical structures, I use the right side of the piece of graph paper to write a more polished version of the sentence. Then I try and figure out what it actually means, which is frequently more difficult than it sounds. My current translation project in particular is difficult because I don’t actually know much of anything about medieval music (a crying shame in a dancer, I know). It took me a long time to figure out what the “hand” the treatise kept referring to was, until I was talking about it with Aasa and she figured out that it was probably the Guidonian hand. This makes a lot more sense than a metonymy for handwriting, which is what I had originally thought. Which is to say, when you’re translating something on a subject you don’t know much about, asking someone who knows more than you do is very helpful for figuring out topic-specific word choices.
You can see in the above image the original Latin text (in three different versions), the Czech translation, and my rough and slightly smoother translations. You can also see on my translation page the notes that I added after finding out about the Guidonian hand. Eventually, after redoing what I have so far in light of this new information, I plan to type it up. This gives me another opportunity to smooth out rough edges in my translation.
Translating from English
Translating from English is actually harder than translating to English for me, because it’s where my lack of fluency really shows. I am better at identifying a grammatical construction that is already in the text than knowing what grammatical construction corresponds with what English phrasing. I have done some longer-form translation from English to Hebrew recently (blog post) but most of my experience translating from English is putting mottoes and similar short phrases into Latin. The processes are similar, however, just on a different scale.
For Latin, I use the same sources listed above. The key difference is the amount of time I spend checking shades of meaning on Wiktionary to make sure I’ve gotten the right meaning. For example, Hessa asked me to translate “tragedy is strength” to Latin recently, which required a lot of back-and-forth checking to make sure I got the right words. The most obvious translation of “tragedy” would be “tragoedia,” but that refers to the dramatic genre and would be totally wrong for this context. So I ended up with “mala” instead, meaning “misfortune” (not “apple”). Which would have been fine, except “vires” is plural instead of singular, so I had to make “mala” plural as well. (Upon looking at Wiktionary rather than just the vocabulary section of Wheelock, it seems that “vires” refers to physical strength and “fortitudo” might have better captured the sense of this motto and avoided the singular/plural problem, oops.)
For Hebrew, in addition to the same sources I use for going from Hebrew to English, I also use pealim.com to check that I’m using the right verb form. Nouns and adjectives are relatively easy for me, but I am very bad at figuring out which binyan a verb is from the infinitive form. I can usually figure out the root letters pretty easily, but the rest of it is beyond me. So that site was super helpful in figuring out whether I needed to do something different with the vowels than my first instinct would tell me. Translating to Hebrew involves even more back-and-forth checking than Latin for me, since someone who actually speaks the language noticing a faux pas is more embarrassing to me than someone who learned a dead language noticing one. So in translating the scroll text I would look up the English word, see the different Hebrew translations, then look up those words to make sure I picked the correct sense. “Arms” was a source of great difficulty for me, and I eventually had to look up “coat of arms” on Wikipedia and check the Hebrew version of the page to make sure I didn’t accidentally say the Crown had awarded the person a new set of body parts.
For both languages, I use a similar writing and translation method as for translating to English, except without the half of the page that involves smoothing out the translation. I am not fluent enough to be able to check how well a translated sentence flows, so I basically just hope for the best. And I consult with people who are better at the language than I am to make sure it works okay.
In general, I hope that what I lack in fluency in my target languages I make up for in attention to capturing the sense, though clearly I don’t succeed all the time. This sounds like a lot of work (and it is), but I actually do enjoy translating as long as the subject is interesting. The theological debates I had to translate as part of my medieval Latin class, on the other hand, were not enjoyable at all.