Introduction

For years, the United Nations Spanish Translation Service (STS) has trained new staff members --translator trainees-- by giving them a grounding in the principles, practices and procedures followed in United Nations documentary translation.¹

After a number of years of satisfactory performance, the Service Chief may decide to require a translator to begin self-revising his/her own work. In this formative period, other revisers would “monitor” his/her jobs.
To follow up on the candidate’s progress, the Service Chief would spot monitor the candidate’s output. He/she would also canvass the opinions of more experienced revisers regarding the fitness of the reviser candidate for his/her new duties.

Until now, unlike a translator trainee, a reviser candidate did not receive any special training or tutoring on the special skills required to perform successfully as a reviser. This approach was predicated on the idea that the reviser candidate would have learnt and absorbed, through his/her own practice and discussion with more experienced colleagues, the full theory and practice of translation and revision.

This approach has worked, and has worked well, for many, many years. With the expansion in the number of self-revisers, the need for specific training of the reviser candidates has become more evident.
This need has been perceived both within and without the United Nations. Articles in specialized translation journals have also pointed out the need for continuing training of translators.²

Justification

It is obvious that, given the constraints of an increasing workload, a translator cannot instantly become a reviser through a period of monitoring unaccompanied by specific comments. Translation workloads at Headquarters have increased significantly and documentation has become more complex. As the United Nations enlarges its responsibilities, both the breadth and the difficulty of documentation require that revisers be provided with training support the better to fulfill their duties.

Therefore, training resources should be employed to supplement the traditional on-the-job training for self-revisers. ³

Areas in Which Reviser Candidates Need Tutoring

Essentially, a reviser trainee needs tutoring:

~ To discard a number of “They told me never to” notions, most of them unfounded, he/she might have
acquired along the way;
~ To sharpen his/her critical skills to spot bad usage, misconstructions, unidiomatic constructions, ^e and subtle errors;
~ To assume the new responsibilities that self-revision imposes for the final output;
~ To develop a documentary style befitting the purposes of United Nations documentation.

Discarding excess baggage. The reviser candidate has to be supported to take stock of “received” lore and to eliminate excess baggage and outright errors. Over the years, he/she might have acquired or been given a number of notions, not all of them correct. (Some of these notions would turn out to be merely the personal preferences of individual revisers disguised as objective precepts.) In most cases, the most capable reviser candidates would have felt for a long time that these notions were not altogether proper. That’s where positive reinforcement by his/her training officer comes in.

Critical faculties. The reviser candidate should be given third-party texts to revise and not only asked to self-revise his/her output. This would give him/her the skills to spot bad usage, unidiomatic constructions, obscurities, and ambiguities. It is easier to see these problems in a third-party text than in one own’s self-revised output.

Increased responsibility. The reviser candidate needs to feel more responsible⁵ for the jobs he/she turns out, since theoretically he/she can no longer defer the solution of difficult problems to a reviser. Also, he/she will lack the “safety filter” provided by a third party --a reviser-- that would catch any mistranslation.

Perfecting the documentary style. It has to be emphasized that documentary translation is not well-served by a hackneyed style. The reviser candidate has to be given the tools to draft, not only a correct, but an authoritative and readable translation. Since the reviser is responsible for the final product, he/she has to be helped to acquire better drafting skills.

Procedures

A reviser candidate would translate and revise his/her own translations and the training officer would go over the material (the old-style monitoring).

To keep a record of the trainee’s progress, as well as to provide him/her with a written evaluation of his/her work, the annotated-text approach has been found serviceable.

Not to deface the revised text, post-it notes with tutoring comments (which the trainee would read before turning in his/her job) or written comments under separate cover are provided.

Written comments, embodied in short memos, ⁶ are an excellent instrument to meet most of the needs identified above.

Also, when a memo with observations is prepared, a record is created to follow up on the reviser candidate’s progress. This record, that can be shared with and commented on by the Section Chief, provides a second level of reviser candidate supervision.

By discussing these observations with the reviser candidate, the training officer would be able to analyze the larger issues of United Nations translation. A training officer should avoid the intricacies of academic translation theory. However, he/she should also attempt to operate at a level higher than the purely empirical. In this one-on-one interaction, the training officer would be able to identify and attempt to correct any perceived flaws in the reviser candidate intellectual apparatus.

Given the increasing emphasis on self-revision, this mentor-trainee relationship, closer at the reviser candidate than at the translator trainee level, would also serve to impart a more cohesive approach to documentary translation in the Service. The training officer would serve as a vehicle for standardizing concepts and procedures.

Conclusion

Both the greater numbers of self-revisers and increased workload and greater level of difficulty of United Nations documentation pinpoint the need to devote specific training resources to preparing the next generation of revisers. Training would be given through an annotated-text approach in the context of a mentor-trainee relationship between the training officer and the reviser candidate. In addition to perfecting the reviser candidate’s abilities and improving his/her intellectual apparatus, this mentor-trainee relationship would underpin a more unified approach to translation in the Service.

Notes

^* This paper was originally a contribution to a 1991 departmental discussion on issues in translation. The author was then training officer at the Spanish Translation Service of the United Nations (New York).

¹ Also, trainees are given, mostly by hands-on example, some notions on the theory of translation. This tutoring approach makes it possible to pass on to the translator trainee a mixture of how-to instructions and general “philosophy” of translation.

² See, for example, Christine Durieux, La formation continue des traducteurs. See other articles in the same issue of April 1998 on the subject of La traduction dans les organisations internationales. (In the original memorandum, the citation had been taken from Traduire, December 1990, No. 146, pp. 3-8.) Previously, a translator was expected to bring to the job a full panoply of intellectual skills, an intellectual apparatus, so to speak. This was possible because students were given a grounding in the humanities first and technical training afterward. Therefore, when the student reached the university (where he would be technically trained), he/she had a more or less full set of intellectual and writing skills to outline and draft papers, theses, etc.
However, that time is now long gone. Translator trainees no longer have the same grounding in the humanities as their predecessors. Therefore, they might lack the intellectual habits and drafting abilities necessary to do a thoroughly good job in the translation of United Nations documentation.

³ The United Nations offers one of the best environments for teaching and enriching the skills of translators and revisers. Nowhere can one find such a variety of talents in a such a challenging and demanding milieu.
Building on that strength, it is possible now to face the new challenge of training the revisers who would carry on the best traditions of the language services of the United Nations to the next century.

⁴ This is particularly important after years of expatriate living.

⁵ After years in a passive, somewhat dependent position, the candidate needs to realize the extent of his/her new responsibilities. In the face of this, some might feel overwhelmed, which is good. The training officer has to make clear to the very few who might shirk this responsibility that promotion to the P-4 level is no mere reward for longevity.

⁶ Directly linked with a job in progress or as a result of an ‘’ex post facto’’ review of completed jobs.