The process of translation 85
The subliminal state is the one that allows translators to earn a living at the work:
in the experienced professional it is very fast, and as we saw in Chapter 2, enhanced
speed means enhanced income. It works best when there are no problems in the
source text, or when the problems are familiar enough to be solved without conscious
analysis. The analytical state is the one that gives the translator a reputation for
probity and acumen: it is very slow, and may in some cases diminish a freelancer's
income, but without this ability the translator would never be able to finish difficult
jobs and would make many mistakes even in easy jobs, so that sooner or later his or
her income would dry up anyway.
The shuttle metaphor is taken from weaving, of course: the shuttle is a block of
wood thrown back and forth on the loom, carrying the weft or cross-thread between
the separated threads of the warp. This metaphor may make the translation process
seem mechanical, like throwing a block of wood back and forth — and clearly, it is
not. It may also make it seem as if the two states were totally different, perfect
opposites, like the left and right side of a loom. The two states are different, but not
perfectly or totally so. In fact, they are made up of very much the same experiential
and analytical materials, which we will be exploring in detail in Chapters 5—11:
experiences of languages, cultures, people, translations; textual, psychological,
social, and cultural analyses. The difference between them is largely in the way that
experiential/analytical material is stored and retrieved for use: in the subliminal
state, it has been transformed into habit, "second nature," procedural memory; in
the analytical state, it is brought back out of habit into representational memory and
painstakingly conscious analysis.
Experience, especially fresh, novel, even shocking experience, also tough-minded
analytical experience, the experience of taking something familiar apart and seeing
how it was put together, is in most ways the opposite of habit — even though in
another form, processed, repeated, and sublimated, it is the very stuff of habit, the
material that habit is made from. Fresh experiences that startle us out of our habitual
routines are the goad to learning; without such shocks to the system we would
stagnate, become dull and stupefied. Fresh experiences make us feel alive; they
roughen the smooth surfaces of our existence, so that we really feel things instead
of gliding through or past them like ghosts.
Translators need habit in order to speed up the translation process and make it
more enjoyable; but they also need new experiences to enrich it and complicate
it, slow it down, and, again, to make it more enjoyable. For there is enjoyment to
be had in translating on autopilot, in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls the
"flow" experience, and there is enjoyment to be had in being stopped dead by some
enormously difficult problem. There is pleasure in speed and pleasure in slowness;
there is pleasure in what is easy and familiar and pleasure in what is new and difficult
and challenging. There is pleasure, above all, in variety, in a shuttling back and forth
between the new and the old, the familiar and the strange, the conscious and the
unconscious, the intuitive and the analytical, the subliminal and the startling.