Confrontational politics

As children, we are taught to tell the truth. As adults, we learn not to. Specifically, as we grow up, it becomes more and more evident that the price of being frank is often frankly high: losing friends, getting people angry and even social isolation.  In other words, most people either do not want to hear or are not ready for criticism and bad news.

Culture plays a major part in establishing acceptable behavior. Many societies highly value social cohesion, including Japan, main stream America and Britain and Arab countries. By contrast, “hotter” countries accept temporary unpleasantness, leading people to develop thick skin. The best examples are the Mediterranean and Latin American countries. There, people are allowed to yell and scream without serious social consequences. You get used to “rude” people or leave for more civil (civilized to some) places. Of course, the adjectives used by such locals are hot and genuine as compared to the cold and fake of more gentile countries. As the French say, chacun à son gout (to each his own). The challenge occurs when cultures meet.

I was at a conference when a woman from an Eastern European country gave a 25 minute presentation while sitting down behind a desk and reading into her paper. I don’t understand how the largely non-native speaker crowd understood anything as I found it difficult to catch any words. Not only that, it reminded me of the Yves Montand song, le telegramme (http://www.jukebox.fr/yves-montand/clip,le-telegramme,qvqu0p.html), in which an operator completes ruins the most romantic telegram by rendering it monotone. The method ruined the message. After some 10 minutes of suffering, I got up and left the room.

The problem arose at the next break when that same lecturer approached me and asked me why I had left early. I faced a cultural schizophrenic dilemma: my American side told me to mumble something about having to go the bathroom or the like while my Israeli psyche took the question literally. The latter prevailed. I told her the truth, trying to soften my words. However, she was not stupid and understood exactly what I meant. The end result was her getting quite upset and me becoming quite confused.

My issue was and is the best way to handle that situation in the future. Should I, as a colleague, defuse the tension by avoiding the issue or take the question at face value, i.e., if you want a critique, you will get one? For comparisons sakes, I had a similar situation a few hours previously but the person agreed with my criticism and thanked me. I tend to think that I will take the latter route as I live in a Mediterranean country where confrontation is a norm. Still, I recognize that discretion is sometimes the better part of valor.  Alas if knew which part.

The Synergy of Writing and Righting

Writing on a certain level is a lonely affair, with the writer bravely trying to fill the blank screen or paper with the intended idea in such a way as the reader will understand it.  In most cases, the author is in a bubble never receiving criticism (in the positive meaning of the word), with the only feedback being the internal drive to make the text better.  As s translator, I live that reality, almost never actually seeing how my best intentioned text arrives at the client’s desk and the latter’s reaction to it.  The major exceptions are texts that are published either as a book or on the Internet.

It should be noted that writing is a such a personal task to which criticism, no matter how well intended, is generally viewed as hostility as if it is the reader’s fault for not understanding what the writer meant or appreciating the author’s unique style.  As a demonstration, my father, who worked as a journalist for the AP for many years, used to edit all of my papers through high school.  Since they usually came back more red than black, I dreaded the experience each time. 

Later, when I wrote my thesis for the MBA, I was grateful for my father’s help as I was working full time and being a father to a small baby. Not having time to revise my raw first drafts, I would send them to him.  They, of course, came to me very bloody.  This time, however, I was grateful for the corrections and did not dread them.

Recently, I translated one of two documents of a large, complicated project involving a price quote from French to English. It turned out that the other document was basically identical.  So, two translators essentially produced two different versions of the same text. After the project was finished, I was asked by the translation company to “harmonize”, that is, create one version.  Overcoming my initial reluctance, I read through the two documents sentence by sentence, comparing the versions and either selecting the better of the two or combining elements of both.  It should be noted that both translations were generally quite good, even if with an occasional gaff.

While the process was time-consuming and tiring, it was extremely enlightening and encouraging. First, the final documents were at a clearly higher level than either of the originals.  Second, discovering the manner of improving the text provided a lesson in better writing I intend to apply to future translations. Last, the experience emphasized that making the search for the perfect text the focus instead of justifying the writer’s word choice is not only vital and possible, but makes self-criticism a positive experience.  To go beyond that quote “There is no good writing; there is only good re-writing,; translators and writers of all kinds can not only benefit from feedback, they can also learn to relish it to the benefit of their work.