WHO FACT CHECKS IN TRANSLATION?

According to this prominent source https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fact-check ,
“fact checking” means “to verify the factual accuracy of”. Works for me. I bring this up
because it has dawned on me that I need to be a lot more confident on the subject of fact
checking when it comes to translation (not least when I translate for a living).
I do appreciate that fact checking is a very broad subject, and that it’s seldom a good idea to
insist on (in all likelihood, loosely defined) narrow and rigid typical approaches for how to do
it in a particular scenario (in other words, the question of what techniques should be
employed, or rejected, when fact checking something). After all, people always claim that
mainstream journalists, whichever side of the spectrum of any given societal issue they
purport to represent, have failed to fact check whatever it is they have been writing about –
I’m not here to take sides but, in the case of journalists in particular, I can imagine that they
are prone to developing compulsive fear of (supposedly) convincing arguments that they have
failed to fact check a story they have covered lest it “reveal their bias” and, by extension,
undermine their credibility. Propaganda can legitimately be regarded as deliberate subversion
of the truth, at least in part (it all depends on the facts on an individual basis), but if we really
do want to talk about the truth and how to ensure its representation, well, that’s just the tip of
the iceberg.
Just so you know, I don’t advocate “fact checking” as a term purely to be associated with
ideas of conspiracy, or duplicity, or exploitation. I myself, having looked at Wikipedia’s list
of (what it calls) ethnic and racial slurs, can confirm that not all of them are equally bad (or
evil, or pernicious, depending on how you want to look at it), even if one were to insist that a
“slur” is always something to be accepted as something grievously offensive and never
justifiable under any circumstances. For example, speaking as a British person, I don’t really
mind being labelled a “limey”; even if a non-British person called me a “limey” like it was
meant as a personal attack, I would think less of them, agreeing that it paints a bad picture of
their mentality, but I would know better than to act like I actually had a good reason to be
provoked into spontaneous violent conduct. I just happened to be born British, but I have no
reason to accept (and by accept I mean entertain, or give oxygen to) any sort of fabricated
negative and unhealthy stigma for it; and so it is with people of any nationality. To me, any
idea of being “proud to be British” on my part is always of secondary concern to me openly
acknowledging and upholding such a principle. I say this because one’s personal attitude will
pretty much nearly always be associated with the question of whether or not they can be
trusted to fact check something. After all, fact checking is, obviously, related to
understanding and grasp of what can only be described as the truth. After all, failure to
mention or outline the truth all too often can impede understanding about just about anything
(however important), and this in turn can lead to “what matters” simply becoming forgotten
over time – with that outlined, is it any wonder that people can become very upset and angry
if someone else implies that they are ignorant?
Maybe you are, in fact, already accustomed to what deserves to be labelled as fact checking
in at least some situations. But I must relate to this the nondescript question of how one
would normally regard / accept something (after all, how do you think the term “fact
checking” came into being in the first place?). One very easily understandable example: if
you were to ask someone how something is developing and they responded by claiming “it’s
improving”, I could fully expect you wanting to know more details of exactly how it is so –
and (if you know better) precisely why they would suggest that (assuming, that is, that it’s not

just outright lying or pretentiousness). The question of your own personal view of the world
(not just theirs; and not just your own personal view of just the other person and the matter at
hand currently under discussion as you remain in conversation with them) factors into it (or
maybe you’re actually more lacking in it when it comes to the specific matter in question;
something which would be easy to believe if whatever you concluded were down purely to
emotion), and one just might tell you, in all honesty and earnestness, that they find that
something is “improving” and you’re comfortable enough believing it is when it actually
isn’t. This would depend largely on exactly how you would normally respond to the content
of the matter in question – certainly if you would normally be inclined to regard it in a certain
way – or at least vague concepts associated with it, in general, arising purely out of your own
mindset. To be blunt, a situation like this amounts to self-deception. I’ve talked about culture
in relation to translation before; I would suggest that there are parallels of that here.
So, what of fact checking in translation? Well, I can initiate people in ideas of fact checking
language easily enough, hence the examples that follow. I remember this thing I thought of
long ago: if you picture a sign at an entrance to somewhere that says, “No dogs allowed;
guide dogs accepted”, how is “accepted” really spelled? Like that or “excepted”? Then I
reveal that, while “accepted” is perfectly correct, “excepted” can also pass as correct in its
own right i.e. guide are dogs are excepted from the ban on dogs. And I have gotten similar
“language inspiration” in actual real life, such as in the title of the Twitter account
“Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces raise in living wage but cuts foreign aid in spending
review”. When I first looked at this, originally I thought that the correct word was “rise”, not
“raise”, since “rise” is an intransitive verb and “raise” is transitive. But soon afterwards I
accepted that, in this case, “raise” is quite acceptable as well as “rise” (while essentially
hinting at the same message, of course). In French, the term for “swear word” is “juron”, but
I can nevertheless totally understand people “mis-remembering” their French and as such
suggesting that it’s “juronnerie”, a word which I don’t quite know whether to describe more
as thrown together or as “half-made up” – but in truth, there is actually a French word
“juronnerie”, but it means more like “the general concept of swearing/swear words”; it’s not
a label for an individual swear word. One more: I personally would declare the “proper”
meaning of “I’m going to get arrested” as different from that of “I’m going to get myself
arrested”. I can already imagine people disputing the facts I put forward here and I’m
prepared for that, but to me the former suggests that someone is actually – oddly enough –
intending to do something which should lead to them being arrested and that’s what they
want; while the latter doesn’t mean that, i.e. the concept “I’m going to get myself arrested (if
I’m not careful).” But it’s all based on personal experience, really (which, by the way, is
supposed to have nothing to do with any question of whether or not I have ever been
arrested!).
But that’s not so much fact checking in translation as fact checking mere words in language
on a purely surface level – let’s go back to the title, as if some people out there might
originally disingenuously take it as sarcasm on my part as if I were trying to ridicule some
argument somewhere that fact checking in translation matters. I’m not. Why do you think I
really wrote this article in the first place? To put forth claims about who I personally
specifically agree does do it and who doesn’t? Come on! Now, I understand that
mistranslations can impede understanding or even worse leave people with false impressions
about something or lead them to make inaccurate conclusions about it (and quite possibly
also things other than the matter they are directly involved with at the time), but that’s not
what I’m trying to get at here. I also accept that clumsy wording can result in the
development of sentences with peculiar or nonsensical meanings, resultant of bad word order

or punctuation or whatever (hence the “eats shoots and leaves” phenomenon) but I’m not
trying to get at that either. No, when I’m doing a translation job for a client, I can but hope
for their intelligence and patience whenever I might feel the need to ask them a question
about something for the purpose of ensuring – not “justifying”, ensuring – some element of
understanding about what I have been able to write for a translation product; always
associated, of course, with the matter of what exactly would be the best thing to put that
would reflect a (preferably non-ambiguous) acknowledgement of the truth that is to be
gathered from the original material. But it can be awkward as I would find it unlikely that
they would be familiar with the language of the original material if it is not English (or else
they wouldn’t have searched for a translation of it into English in the first place, would
they?), and my challenge is therefore “to understand over accept”. That said, I in particular
have translated many terms and conditions and much job / education programme materials as
part of my professional translation career in the past and I know that what I read in this stuff
has nothing to do with me (of course it’s fair to point out that it’s none of my business, and I
should expect the demand of confidentiality and all that), which essentially makes the content
of such material no more relevant to me than my progress in my latest Civ 6 game on my PS4
would be to anyone who isn’t me. I’d say that fabricating some sort of concept as to the
content of the original to work from, however vague and even if there is nothing objective
about it, is essential to me when I do more challenging translation work. But thank God I
have direct access to Google to help enlighten me with terms I come across that I’m just not
familiar with (or, as the case may be, clearly not 100% familiar with in actual reality) – and
that’s just one example.
At this point I will mention that, in my case, fact checking in translation is indeed fact
checking in the interest of maintaining a career as a professional translator and a source of
income. The fact that I am a sole trader might leave some with the impression that, for a
professional, I’m used to doing everything how I want, and following my own procedures
and goals at all times with no fear of them being changed from above against my will;
without those I am supposed to cooperate with “complicating things”. Obviously, if I worked
for someone, I would be expected to cooperate with whomever I reported to, my boss, in
particular (along with colleagues, of course), but it’s just as important the other way round.
But, for the sake of sincerity regarding what I really do, I acknowledge that sometimes
reliable fact checking is not always possible by oneself from a comfortable spot, and in that
sense the least I can do is make a determined effort to cooperate with my own customers in
connection with a really awkward bit within a job I have done for them. And when I talk
about cooperation in particular in this blog, I say it because I wonder if some would be of the
impression that I have some kind of narrow and rigid mental model of glibly held
expectations about what a day in my industry really is like, or “should be” like, and would be
resistant to accepting anything that deviates from it – with the risk of coming across as
arrogant as a result. Yet, that said, I feel that sometimes it can be hard for one to tell the
difference between ideas about what a situation really is like and ideas about what it should
be like – surely this only further serves to emphasise my own appreciation of the fact
checking imperative in my work.
There exists the perfectly valid argument that the truth has become even harder to find /
discern in the modern day and age. When the Internet came along, some people eventually
became obsessed with social media, and with this came a growing trend in people posting
opinions and information which were more about so-called validation of their own ego –
supposedly with no expectation of any consequences which would deserve to be labelled as
serious – than about concern for unbiased intellectual merit. And, let’s be honest, it’s not

always about trivial or meaningless stuff, like celebrity gossip. This trend hasn’t ceased
today, by any means. I think in particular of the Selection for Societal Sanity discussion bit
near the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty – Hideo Kojima will know what I’m
talking about. Even if you argue that there’s plenty of information “out there” which was just
never meant to be taken all that seriously, so to speak, honouring biased truth (and there are
many, many branches of it) out of a selfish desire for convenience, and denial, is good for
nothing but causing division and promoting ignorance, like I said earlier (certainly when all
people can do – or will do, depending on how you want to look at it – is cling to certain
falsely held arguments for the sake of their own untested credibility). Then along came the
term “fake news” (and President Donald Trump did not coin this term)!
What really motivated me to write this blog was this fairly recent job I did, German to
English – after I completed it, I was told that I had not translated “ Gesellschaft bürgerlichen
Rechts” correctly. Having done a bit of research since, I have to say that it seems like they
were right. But, in my own defence, my reasoning behind my original, incorrect translation
was as follows:
“bürgerliches Recht” means “civil law”
“Gesellschaft” can mean “society” but it is also frequently used to mean “company” in the
sense of a business entity
Ergo “civil law company” – but that sounded too literal to me so I rewrote it “civil law firm”
But it was terms and conditions and, believe me, I would never allow for an insouciant literal
translation of such material. In another recent project I thought I was being smart when I
guessed that a proper English translation of “parc informatique” in French was “server room”
or “server” but I had the good sense to check it anyway, and it was a good job I did, because
it actually means “IT infrastructure” – something which, unlike a server room or a server, is
not even a tangible item. In another French to English job I read, “le Coureur accepte que
l’Employeur puisse transférer si necessaire (ses données personnelles)” in the original, and
would eventually put for it “The Runner accepts that the Employer may transfer, if necessary,
(their personal data)” – I’m not used to accepting “accepter que” as only really amounting to
authorisation of something.
But I carry on. My translation career has always been a journey that has produced some fine
stories to tell, and I’m not too nervous or afraid to continue it. Of course, if I ever did get
afraid with respect to it, I can, now, appreciate that the approach required to deal with it
would require more than just laughing at my fear in defiance and determination to attain
something (“something” being “something”) better.