30 September is International Translation Day and its theme in 2024, as chosen by the International Federation of Translators, is Translation, an art worth protecting. As a focus for this year's celebrations, the broad theme of valuing and protecting translations centres around the issue of copyright, a right which ensures that the creator of an original work receives recognition, payment – and thus protection – for that work.
Long an issue for all creative arts, copyright originally applied only to the copying of books. Copyright law has developed over time to the extent that today it also includes derivative works – those based on the interpretation of an original piece and which transform the original into a new, separate and substantially changed creation in its own right. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works names musical arrangements, alterations of literary and artistic works, and also translations as worthy of protection by copyright, without affecting the copyright in the original work.
The issue of copyright in translation is important for many reasons, perhaps most fundamentally because it is a recognition in law that translation is a creative art. Surprisingly, despite translation’s long history and contribution to world culture, the view of this art as a mechanical transfer of words from one language to another still persists, even within the translation industry. Lloyd Bingham reported in the context of his visit to SlaterCon in London earlier this year - a conference which included discussions around AI and translation - that translation can be viewed as “’drudgery’” and that “being a translator is apparently a ‘grind’” (https://www.iti.org.uk/discover/iti-bulletin.html*).
However, we who practise the art of translation recognise that, in addition to specialist subject knowledge, translation also requires a high level of text interpretation, cultural knowledge and linguistic craftsmanship to convey the precision of the original in a target language text with clear, accurate but meaningful equivalence. So in a period of change in our industry, on this International Translation Day let us celebrate the value of linguistic complexity, the creativity of translators and the sheer joy of translation as an art.
* Lloyd Bingham, "In the loop", ITI Bulletin, September-October 2024, 12-14.
Comments