Translation as a puzzle

When I’m not hacking my way around a golf course or forlornly chasing balls on a tennis court, some of the things I enjoy the most in my spare time are puzzle-solving activities, specifically chess, escape rooms and social deduction games. And this, I believe, goes hand-in-hand with my love of translation – for what is translation if not a complex linguistic puzzle, sometimes with multiple equally accurate (yet entirely different) answers?

As with any puzzle, the first thing you have to do before charging into the fray is “What problem am I actually trying to solve, here?” Easier said than done, sometimes, as anyone who did GCSE maths will certainly agree. Just as, in a logic problem, you are trying to best identify what an accurate solution might look like, so in translation is your first priority to assess what the readership for this particular text is, and therefore how best to apply your skills to solving the puzzle. And it’s not always immediately obvious – a chess puzzle may initially appear to require you to sacrifice a bishop for the optimum result, all the while you’re ignoring a crucial checkmating opportunity on the other side of the board. So, if you’re solving the wrong problem, your output will suffer.

Now, on to the process itself. This is where it’s closest to an escape room: you’ve got a series of coherent elements to discover, and finding the best way to unlock them is the secret to success. This is usually a combination of research (both factual and linguistic), experience and writing ability. And, just as you get better at solving similar types of clues as you practise them more, so does your pattern recognition (for complex technical texts) and linguistic flair (for more creative work) improve over time. Not every puzzle is going to be instantly soluble, nor is there an obvious answer to every translation problem posed by a tricky text: it takes time, experience and often a meaningful connection with the culture whose language you are translating from to eventually find that perfect answer.

And when you do arrive at something that works, the feeling is profoundly rewarding. Back in the days when I used to do a lot more translation myself, I would sometimes be so stuck in the weeds during a project that I wouldn’t even notice what problems I was solving until I went back and proof-read it. It was only during these checks that I’d spot particular turns of phrase or (I’d like to think) elegant solutions to awkward expressions and be pleased with the outcome. Just like looking back at a sequence of puzzles you have solved to flee from an escape room with seconds to spare, reviewing a piece of work you have translated can reveal an elegant tapestry of language – it is a profoundly human process, and one that I sincerely hope will remain such for years to come, in spite of the wishes of our technology overlords.