The Challenges for Greek-Polish Translators
Becoming a translator specializing in Greek and Polish is not easy. This article will summarize the difficulties an aspiring translator meets in regard to education and market needs in Poland and Greece.
Résumé
La communication polonais-grec ne va pas de soi étant donné les nombreuses différences de grammaire, de ponctuation et de syntaxe, notamment, entre les deux langues. Il faut donc pouvoir compter sur des traducteurs possédant une formation en la matière pour établir des ponts entre les deux pays.
En Pologne, la profession est encadrée. Les praticiens doivent réussir un examen officiel pour obtenir le titre de traducteur assermenté. Jusqu’en 2016, on comptait moins de dix traducteurs assermentés pour produire des traductions officielles à partir du grec ou vers le grec.
En Grèce, où tout un chacun peut se dire traducteur, les traductions officielles proviennent de trois sources : le service de traduction du ministère des Affaires étrangères, les traducteurs membres de l’Association panhellénique des diplômés de traduction professionnelle de l’Université Ionienne (PEEMPIP) et les avocats qui peuvent certifier qu’ils ont une bonne connaissance des langues des traductions qu’ils produisent.
Dans les faits, les membres de la PEEMPIP produisent des traductions officielles dans seulement trois combinaisons de langues (anglais-grec, français-grec et allemand-grec), et les avocats confient bien souvent leurs traductions à quiconque se prétend traducteur et certifient ces documents – médiocrement traduits la plupart du temps – comme étant le fruit de leur propre travail.
En Pologne, deux universités offrent des programmes d’études en grec ancien et moderne, mais ces programmes ne portent pas spécifiquement sur la traduction. Ainsi, pour obtenir un diplôme en traduction dans la spécialisation grec-polonais, l’étudiant doit suivre des cours généraux de traduction ou s’inscrire aux études spécialisées de traduction de l’anglais au polonais ou de l’anglais au grec. Par ailleurs, les traducteurs ou aspirants traducteurs polonais-grec doivent composer avec le fait qu’il n’existe pas de manuels scolaires ni de dictionnaires qui puissent leur venir en aide directement. Ils passent donc le plus souvent par une langue pivot, souvent l’anglais, pour effectuer leurs recherches.
Il faut dire que jusqu’à tout récemment, la paire de langues polonais-grec était très peu en demande. La situation change toutefois tranquillement depuis que le polonais est devenu, en 2004, l’une des langues officielles de l’Union européenne. Les traducteurs disposent maintenant du moteur de recherche multilingue de l’institution, et, de son côté, l’Université de Varsovie a entrepris la rédaction d’un dictionnaire complet grec-polonais, qui devrait contenir plusieurs volumes.
On remarque depuis quelque temps une augmentation des relations d’affaires entre la Pologne et la Grèce. De plus en plus d’entreprises grecques souhaitent exporter leurs produits en Pologne. On voit donc apparaître un besoin de traduction professionnelle de sites Web, de descriptions de produits, de contrats, etc.
Malgré ces avancées, il reste encore à changer la perception qu’une traduction peut être faite par quiconque parle deux langues – perception à la source des traductions de mauvaise qualité. Le problème se vit avec d’autant plus d’acuité pour les traducteurs de paires de langues rares, où le client est en général incapable de vérifier l’exactitude de la traduction et doit se fier entièrement aux compétences du langagier.
Polish and Greek belong to the Indo-European family of languages, which is split into several divisions. Polish belongs to the Slavic division, whereas Greek is in a separate branch on its own. Although both languages have many similarities, like how they describe the world in words, there are many differences in grammar, punctuation, word order, and so on.
From a linguistic point of view, communication between Poland and Greece is quite challenging. Professionally trained translators are therefore needed to create a bridge between these two countries.
A little background
The profession of a translator in Poland is regulated by law. Translators enjoy recognition after having passed an official examination giving them the status of a sworn translator. Until 2016, there were less than 10 sworn translators (4 more joined before the end of 2016) who could provide an official translation from or into Greek.
In Greece, translators do not have such recognition. Anyone can claim to be a translator and provide translations. This is especially true for rare language pairs like Greek and Polish. In Greece, there are three entities providing official translations: the Translation Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, translators who are members of the Panhellenic Association of Professional Translation Graduates of the Ionian University (PEEMPIP), and lawyers who can certify that they have a good knowledge of the languages involved in the translation.
The problem is that PEEMPIP members can only provide official translations in three languages (English, French and German) combined with Greek, whereas lawyers usually outsource their translations to anyone who claims to be a translator and then stamp it as official translation they did themselves.
Due to this uncontrolled situation with certified translations, clients usually receive texts of poor quality. Another contributing factor is the lack of formal education for translators in Greek and Polish.
Limited educational resources
Translators working with Greek and Polish are mainly Greeks who have lived in Poland for many years and who translate mainly into Greek, or Poles who speak Greek after having lived for some years in Greece or who have acquired it due to personal interests.
As far as formal education is concerned, there are two universities in Poland that offer extensive Ancient and Modern Greek language and literature courses. However, none of these courses focus on training translators. So, to obtain a translation degree, a student has to take any translation-related course or choose to study translation from English into Polish or from English into Greek.
Until recently, there was no market need for translations in such a rare language pair, so no institution was interested in providing help to aspiring translators. As mentioned, the Polish Ministry of Justice awards translators who have successfully passed the exams with the title of sworn translator. Translators may translate and interpret both ways in the languages in which they were examined. The difficulty for Greek-Polish translators is that there are no textbooks or dictionaries for future sworn translators in this language pair.
With market needs changing, there may soon be some steps taken toward the creation of training materials. The University of Warsaw has already undertaken writing a comprehensive Greek-Polish dictionary, which is expected to run to several volumes.
Using a pivot language in translations
Since there are no Polish-Greek dictionaries today, except for small dictionaries with phrases for tourists, and no corpora of translated texts, translators are often forced to use a pivot language in their research. Frequently, the third language is English, which provides a broad range of solutions.
Fortunately, the situation has been slowly changing since 2004, when Polish became one of the official languages of the European Union. Translators can now use the multilingual search engine of the European Union, where the main source language is English, but the results can be displayed in three different languages side by side for easier comparison. However, these translations need to be used with caution as sometimes they are done by unqualified translators and contain many errors.
Emerging market
The documents most often translated from Polish into Greek and the other way around are birth certificates, diplomas, powers of attorney, court proceedings and other legal documents. There is no need to create translation memories as most of the documents are scanned PDFs or images that cannot be reused. Every translator keeps a private archive of the translated documents to help with the future projects.
Recently there has been a noticeable increase in business contacts between Poland and Greece. More and more companies in Greece are interested in exporting their products to Poland, and there is a need for professional translations of websites, product descriptions, manuals, contracts, and other related documents. Companies are starting to recognize the need for providing information in their client’s language.
What still needs to change, however, is the perception that translations can be done by whoever speaks two languages – a perception that is the source of bad and wrong translations. This is especially important for translators of rare language pairs, where the client most often cannot verify the correctness of the translation and must rely completely on the translator’s abilities.
Conclusion
Aspiring translators who would like to work professionally with Greek and Polish can only depend on their own intuition and on the knowledge of colleagues in the same language pair. There are no courses designed for translators with Greek and Polish, nor textbooks to study to become a sworn translator. To acquire formal education, a student must earn a degree in translation and then apply that knowledge to Greek and Polish. There is a big gap in training specifically designed for translators of rare languages – a situation that may soon change to meet emerging market needs.
Zaneta Barska is an accredited Polish translator with experience in Greece, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. She has studied English and Greek Philology at the University of Athens with a focus on language and linguistics issues and translation. She holds a Translation MA from the University of Surrey with specialization in Greek and Polish translations. She has contributed to “The legacy of the Greek language” an innovative study which examines the influence of Greek on other languages around the world. Currently she lives and works as a translator and writer in London.
