EXPERIENCE – DOUGLAS ROBINSON

THESIS: Experience comes in many shapes and sizes: wild and educated guesses when faced with
an apparently insuluble problema (abduction), exposure to a variety of cases over a long perior,
generally called “practical experience” (induction), and theoretical teaching or training based on
laws or general principles (deduction.)

WHAT EXPERIENCE?

Obviously experience is essential for all humans, the question is what experience is essential for
the translator’s work.

Knowledge of a language and exposure to it is as important as knowledge of a field and exposure

to it. Sometimes, a solid experiential grounding in a language can get you through even a difficult
specialized text when you have little or no experience of the subject matter and vice versa.

In specific cases a certain level of experience may be enough or essential, but few translators
have the luxury of knowing in advance what will be required to do the job at hand. So what is
important is experiencing as much of everything as possible. The more experience of the world,
the better.

A good translator always wants to know more, always wants to have experienced more.

Experience of the world sometimes confirms the translator’s habits. There are some regularities
to social life that make some aspects of our existence predictable. But experience holds constant
surprises for us as well. Familiar words and phrases are used in unfamiliar ways, so we wonder
how we ever believed ourselves fluent in the language.

The translator’s habits make it possible to translate faster, more reliably and enjoyably, but if
they are not broken, reliability stagnates into mechanical tedium.

INTUITIVE LEAPS (ABDUCTION)

Some would say that intuition should not take part at all in translation. Since intuition is often
equated with guessing, and guessing with randomness or chance, this means that nothing in
translation should be left to intuition. This is an extreme position.

Even though a translation cannot be based solely on intuition, intuitive leaps are an essential
part of the translation process. The process of remembering and vetting words and phrases is
steeped in intuitive leaps. A good translator will develop a rough sense of when to trust these
intuitive leaps and when they need to be tested.

They may be unavoidable at the leading edge of the translation process, but even editing is
heavily grounded in intuitive leaps. The source that decides some word or phrase is wrong is the
exact same set of experiences that produced it in the first place.

PATTER-BUILDING (INDUCTION)

Induction is more than sheer mindless exposure to messes of material. It is a process of sifting
mindfully through the material, constantly looking for regularities, patterns, generalities that
can bring some degree of order and thus predictability and even control to the swirl of
experience.

The mindfulness that raises experience to and inductive process is a readiness to notice and
reflect upon words and phrases and register shifts and all other linguistic and non-linguistic
material to which a translator is constantly being exposed.

While the inductive process of finding patterns in large quantities of experiences has the power
to transform our subliminal habits, it is ultimately effective once it is incorporated into those
subliminal habits.

RULES AND THEORIES (DEDUCTION)

Deductive principles should arise out of the translator’s own experience, the inductive testing
of abductive hypotheses through a series of individual cases.

In abduction the translator tries something that feels right; in induction she allows broad
regularities to emerge from the material she has been exposed to.

In deduction the translator begins to impose those regularities on new materials by way of
predicting or controlling what they will entail. So general principles don’t become too rigid,
deduction must always be fed from below, remaining flexible in response to pressures from new
abductions and inductions to rethink what she thought was understood.

This model is often inefficient. Learning general principles from one’s own abductive and
inductive experience is enormously time-consuming and labour-intensive and frequently
narrow.