双语 | 生日快乐，特朗普总统！但你的英语真让译员头大

2017年6月14日，一年中的第165天，离全年结束还有200天，也是第45任美国总统唐纳德·特朗普的71岁生日。

这位不按套路出牌的总统喜欢用“推特”治国，总是语出惊人，从来不缺乏话题。在公开演讲时，特朗普不喜欢遵循演讲稿，而是“任性”地自由发挥，语法和逻辑在他面前似乎都不值一提，广大译员痛心地表示：这真让人头大！

When he announced his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change agreement, Donald Trump did something unexpected: he embraced sentence structure and basic grammar. You could almost hear his speechwriters exhale when they realised he was – for the most part – sticking to their script.

当唐纳德·特朗普宣布美国退出巴黎气候协定时，他的一番举动着实有点让人意外：他的演讲完全遵照正确的句子结构和基本语法。当他的演讲稿撰稿人发现他大部分内容都是照着稿子念时，你几乎都能听见他们长舒了一口气。

There must have been a similar sense of relief among the world’s interpreters, who have grown accustomed to making sense of the president’s frequent mangling of the English language.

对于已经逐渐习惯特朗普的混乱英语，并要弄懂其含义的国际译员来说，也同样感到如释重负。

Interactions with world leaders have left interpreters scratching their heads about how to communicate what Trump is trying to say, when his speech baffles even native English speakers.

特朗普与世界各地领导人互动时，也常常弄得译员抓耳挠腮，根本不知道该怎么传递特朗普表达的意思，甚至连母语为英语的译员都搞不明白。

His idiosyncratic take on the English language is causing trouble for interpreters around the world. In Asia, where the middle classes pride themselves on their English ability, Trump’s fumbles are widely mocked. But translating Trump for almost two-thirds of the world’s population is causing chaos among translators.

他在英语语言方面的特殊表现给世界各地的译员造成了麻烦。在亚洲，中产阶级以较高的英语水平自许，于是，特朗普的笨嘴笨舌遭到了大家的嘲笑。对译员们来说，为世界上近三分之二的人翻译特朗普的讲话，让他们很凌乱。

Translators around the world are struggling to interpret Donald Trump’s unique speaking style with the Japanese finding it particularly “nightmarish” to translate what they call “Trumpese”.

各国译员正绞尽脑汁翻译特朗普独特的演讲风格，日本译员把这种风格称为“川普腔”，翻译“川普腔”对他们而言尤其是个“噩梦”。

English-Japanese interpreters are reportedly struggling to follow the US President’s speeches, with many highlighting the contrast in style with his predecessor Barack Obama who was recognized as a great orator.

据说，日英译员在听特朗普的演讲时十分吃力，许多译员特别提到，特朗普与前任总统奥巴马的演讲风格迥然不同，而奥巴马则是公认的优秀演说家。

“He rarely speaks logically, and he only emphasizes one side of things as if it were the absolute truth. There are lots of moments when I suspected his assertions were factually dubious,” interpreter Chikako Tsuruta told The Japan Times.

译员鹤田知佳子告诉《日本时报》记者：“他说话很没有逻辑，往往只强调事情的一方面，似乎认为这就是绝对的真理。很多时候我都怀疑他的言论是否属实。”

“He is so overconfident and yet so logically unconvincing that my interpreter friends and I often joke that if we translated his words as they are, we would end up making ourselves sound stupid.”

“他无比自信，但在逻辑上却丝毫没有说服力，我常和译员朋友开玩笑说，如果我们照着他的原话翻译，就会让我们自己听起来像个傻瓜。”

Ms Tsuruta, who routinely covers US news as an interpreter for CNN, ABC and CBS, raises the important issue dividing the translation community - whether controversial rhetoric should be toned down by the interpreter.

鹤田是CNN、ABC和CBS的译员，每天都要进行美国新闻报道，她提出了翻译界一个颇具争议的重要问题——译员是否应该把有争议性的言辞译得更温和一些。

Some believe inflammatory language should be neutralized while others remain adamant that translators should not interfere with tone or register.

有些人认为，应该把过激言论译得中立些，而其他人则坚称，译者不应干涉说话人的语气语调。

However, the difficulty of translating Mr. Trump does not necessarily arise from the language he uses.

然而，“川普腔”难翻译也不一定是因为他的语言。

A Carnegie Mellon University Language Technologies Institute (LTI) “readability analysis” of presidential campaign speeches revealed last year that the former real-estate mogul’s lexical complexity was the lowest of any of his rival candidates or past US presidents.

去年，卡内基梅隆大学语言技术研究所对总统竞选演讲的“可读性分析”表明，与所有竞选对手和美国历任总统相比，这位前房地产大亨的词汇是最简单的。

Experienced broadcast interpreter Miwako Hibi said it was “very hard” to follow Mr. Trump’s train of thought as he speaks.

资深广播口译员日比美和子表示，特朗普先生讲话时，自己“很难”跟上他的思路。

She told The Japan Times of her feeling of dread while she was translating Mr. Trump’s victory speech live in November 2016.

日比美和子向《日本时报》表示，2016年11月她为特朗普胜选演讲直播做翻译时，就感到很担心。

“When he suddenly said ‘Reince is a superstar,’ I was literally thrown off. Only after the camera zoomed in on the face of a ‘Reince’ did I realize who Trump was talking about, and I hastily added, for the sake of the audience, that it’s actually ‘Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman,’” Ms Hibi said.

日比说：“他突然说‘赖因斯是个超级明星’，当时我真的一下子懵了。直到镜头对准‘赖因斯’面部时我才意识到特朗普在说什么，考虑到观众，我赶忙补充道其实是‘共和党全国委员会主席赖因斯•普利巴斯’。”

“The convenient thing about the Japanese language, however, is that it tends to do away with a subject in a sentence, so in this particular case, I first translated ‘superstar’ without clarifying who Trump was referring to, and carried on like this until I got a fuller picture.”

“日语的方便之处在于句子常常会省略主语，所以在这种特定情况下，我先翻出了‘超级明星’，并没有明确特朗普指的是谁，然后就这样继续翻了下去，直到弄清了整件事。”

However his reference to “secretariat,” threw her, thinking he was referring to Mr. Preibus by another name.

然而，特朗普提到“秘书”时把她弄糊涂了，以为他换了个称呼指代普利巴斯先生。

“I mistranslated that one,” she said. “It didn’t even occur to me that he was talking about a race horse. … It’s really hard to follow his train of thought.”

她说：“我把这句话翻错了，根本没想到他在谈论一匹赛马……要想跟上他的思维节奏真是太难了。”

For retired interpreter Kumiko Torikai, when a subject is making racist or misogynistic comments a translator’s job becomes complicated - one of the reasons she decided to leave the profession in the 1980s.

在退休译员鸟饲久美子看来，如果话题出现种族歧视或歧视女性的言论，译员的工作就很难做了。这也是她在上世纪80年代决定退出翻译行业的原因之一。

“As an interpreter, your job is to translate the words of a speaker exactly as they are, no matter how heinous and what an outrageous liar you find the speaker to be,” she said.

她说：“作为口译员，你的工作就是把讲者的话一字不差地翻译出来，不管你认为他有多么令人厌恶或者是个多么无耻的骗子。”

“You set aside all your personal emotions and become the speaker yourself. It’s a really tough thing, not being allowed to demonstrate your own judgment about what is right and what is wrong. And that’s why I quit.”

“你需要抛却所有个人感情，让自己成为发言人。这是非常艰巨的任务，你不能表现出自己关于对错的判断，这就是我退行的原因。”

However, she insisted: “If Trump is not making sense, you don’t get to make sense, either. If his language is coarse, that’s the way you translate him."

不过她坚持认为：“如果特朗普词不达意，你也不必言之有理。如果他的语言比较粗劣，你照翻就行。”

英文来源：The Guardian, The Independent

编译：Lyla、Janet、阿狸

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