[Sca-cooks] Translation Criteria - long

[tgl at mailer.uni-marburg.de]

It is a very valuable idea to break down the duty of a judge into
certain component parts of this duty and to formulate criteria to make
these components more easy to handle. I find most of the criteria very
useful, including the 3 pages criterion. It is a matter of time and
energy, and, clearly, one can get some idea from three pages, whether or
not a translation is probably a 'good', a reliable one, what kind of
translation it is, how the translator has done his/her work ...

Allow for a further remark: I did not recognize one point in your list,
that seems to be of some importance in the judgement of translations:

    CORRECTNESS (say 140 points)

Is there some use of a translation that is splendidly documented, of
some lenght, phantastically worded in idiomatic English, on a subject
matter of some intricacy, if the translation is wrong or partly wrong?
As I can say from experience, there are many ways to go astray in
translating old texts. Sure, some cases are a matter of dispute and
interpretation, but others seem to be clear cases of right or wrong.

Judging a translation is checking a translation and that involves in
part a redoing of the translation. And that requires at least some
expertise in the subject matter and some mastery of the language
involved.

As I am not a cook nor a recreationist, but only sort of an
old-text-freak, a question about the rule of the competition game comes
to mind: How can someone who is a specialist in say Early Modern
embroidery, but who isn't into cookery, legal history or fencing nor
into 15th century English judge translations of 15th century cookery or
legal or fencing texts?

If judging a translation is to be more than looking if all the relevant
documents, a sufficient number of notes and idiomatic English are there,
then there should be some judgement of accuracy and correctness too. To
make such a judgement requires both knowledge and time/energy. There is
no problem to spend two hours or three days to puzzle out ONE medieval
recipe if you come across a hard one.

Judgements on accuracy/ correctness may be the beginning of a dispute,
but as I can say from experience (again): dispute is the engine of
progress.

Thus, how about two additions to your list:

-- accuracy/correctness as a further criterion for translations

-- A requirement for any person to act as a judge is some degree of
expertise on the subject matter and some mastery of the language(s)
involved. [e.g.: if you want to judge a translation from Meister Johann
Liechtenauers 'Kunst des Fechtens', you must know something about late
medieval fencing and its techniques and you must know late medieval
German.]

Th.