Translating Global Awareness

Global awareness can be said to be a fundamental consciousness essential for translation. After all, what needs to be translated is usually entire passages of speech or text, rather than just one or two simple sentences. Whenever a full sentence appears, the translator must always bear in mind the overarching idea, considering the entire text as a whole, and evaluating and revising the translation within the context of the entire passage. Otherwise, there may be issues such as contradictions in the translation, inaccuracies, omissions, or redundancies. In the following, based on my own experience, I will discuss the issues related to global awareness that I have encountered in translation practice.

Firstly, in the work of subtitling groups, global awareness is particularly important. Because an entire movie or TV series, due to its long duration and large workload, is usually divided among several translators to work together. While this method helps reduce the workload, it also brings about some issues. For example, the name of a character may be translated differently by different group members. In such cases, proofreaders are required to unify and correct them in the final draft, or to verify character names before starting the translation work. Furthermore, as the plot of movies and TV shows usually gradually unfolds over time, some foreshadowing buried in the earlier parts may only be realized later, while some later events may echo with earlier parts. If one does not familiarize themselves with the entire film or show beforehand, these "foreshadowings" and "echoes" may be overlooked in translation. The simple way to avoid such issues is to watch the film or show at least once before and after the translation, understand the general development and direction of the story, make note of the "foreshadowings" and "echoes," and ensure they are not missed during translation. Finally, have the proofreaders integrate all the translated parts to resolve deviations caused by task assignments.

Another type of translation problem arises from the repetition of keywords in the text. This issue is particularly common in French articles because the French dislike complete word repetition. Even if the words have the same meaning, the French tend to creatively use synonyms to replace them in the text. Therefore, sometimes we can only determine which words actually refer to the same thing and have the same meaning after reading through the entire article. In other cases, the same word in the text may have different meanings because the French also enjoy wordplay, whether it's homonyms or multiple meanings, they may frequently appear in French articles. This requires us to check the repeated vocabulary after reading the entire article, to see if their meanings are truly the same, or if there is a hidden message behind them.

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