Working in the wrong direction

I’ve been asked to write a guest post on a Georgian blog. In Georgian, that is. I’ve said I will. I’ve also agreed for it to be published unedited, uncorrected, unsanitised….

Marvel at the foreigner tame the Georgian verb!

Or, maybe:

Watch the foreigner have her butt kicked by tense markers!
Chuckle at her inability to put subject and object in the correct case!
Wonder at her idiosyncractic sentence formation!

And, finally:

Ask yourself how on earth she’s claiming to be a translator if this is her command of Georgian…

Maybe you sense a little trepidation?

The timing of this is perfect, in a sense. I’ve been wrestling for a few weeks now with the question of whether or not to publish posts in Georgian on this blog. It’s why I haven’t updated recently. But now it’s been decided for me. Thank goodness for that.

Why the hesitation? Well, give me a passage to translate into English and I’m happy and competent. Ask me to translate into Georgian, or to write in Georgian, and I’m alot less happy and less competent.

Now, I don’t have a particular problem with this. It’s to be expected. Georgian is not my mother tongue. I live in the UK. I don’t speak or write in Georgian on a daily basis. As a linguist I know all about the distinction between receptive and expressive language skills and I know that there’s often an imbalance between the two. Even with a grammatically straighforward language like French I would never claim mother-tongue fluency, so there’s no way I’d claim it for a more complex one like Georgian.

And I don’t. I don’t offer translation into Georgian. In the UK that fits in with professional standards for translators. You don’t translate out of your mother tongue because when you do you can’t guarantee quality. You make mistakes. You don’t use idioms in quite the right way. Your word order goes clunky. It just “reads wrong”.

Alot of people don’t get that, though. They assume that knowing a language means knowing it every which way. I’ve had clients almost demand that I offer translation both ways. They don’t see how it’s possible for there to be a difference in my levels of competence in the two languages…

And so I worry: if I write flawed Georgian will people infer that my understanding of Georgian – and by extension my translations out of it – will also be flawed? Substandard? I really hope not.

But anyway, as I said, the decision’s been made for me. And so I’ll write that guest post, and then hopefully I’ll write some more. It’ll be for fun and to better my Georgian. I’m not intending to suddenly start offering translation both ways. And if anyone asks why, I’ll get them to listen really carefully for the sound of Georgian blog-readers chuckling at my errors.