On Anglicisms
This is a slightly edited version of a post I made on Cohost three months ago, although I could've sworn it was older than that. It was nice putting those thoughts out there and people liked it back then, so I'm adding it here in part because I don't know what else to write about. I might repost some other posts as well, but I have no idea whether I'll remember what was worthwhile or not.
Back when I took a course on dubbing translation, I wasn't able to have the best attendance, since I was working full time and starting to get captioning freelance jobs to do at night, but some things really stuck with me there.
First of all, my teacher has a very long career and worked on shows such as Hamtaro and Powerpuff Girls (also as a voice actress), and hearing her talking about the experience of adapting all the characters' names and even going to Japan after landing the job was so cool. You don't always have the opportunity to hear someone so experienced talking about both their craft and experiences, so that was invaluable. Second was a lecture we had with another voice actress, where the same applies (that's how I learned Disney won't, or at least wouldn't, allow any swearing on international dubs of their movies, even something like The Last Duel).
The third and most important part was a lecture with another translator, who talked extensively and passionately about not just writing well, but also especially avoiding what he calls "anglicisms." To sum it up, that basically means translating the text way too close to the structure of the original's phrasing, as well distorting the traditional meaning of words to be closer to English, which happens way more than I'd realized at the time, and I was (and probably still am) guilty of doing that. I do believe watching that lecture genuinely made me a better translator, maybe even a better writer in general, although I'll admit I'm far from being that good to begin with. I won't get into many specifics now, but a famous example is how the word "eventualmente" started to be used the same way as the English word "eventually," just on the basis of being cognates, even though they were supposed to have different meanings. Another one which will stay with me forever is how we started using the word "sobre" a lot more, just because the word "about" (its "equivalent") has many different usages and is very versatile in English, taking the spot of other words in Portuguese which convey the same idea. And so on, the list goes on much deeper than that.
I'm not hoping to do it justice here in a few words, but I'm not exaggerating, that lecture was one of the turning points of my career today, it really has made such an impact on how I look at the text while doing translation, and I'm always telling people about it cause it's good advice that doesn't seem super obvious at first. I know languages evolve and all of that is somewhat a natural process, but with the way it's happening it often just makes the text look uglier, it sounds like "translationese," where you know exactly how it was written in the original because it sticks so close to the source's structure and stops sounding natural. And that's obviously not good, it takes you out of the story.
This was just supposed to be a short recollection at first, but, yeah, it's easy to fall into anglicisms, so if you're translating or even just writing in another language, I recommend paying attention if the text isn't sounding a little too much like English sentence structuring and whether that's really the best way it could be written.