My entry of yesterday regarding the urgent need for a Krio (Yoruba) translator brings up an issue that I must investigate. What happens when you need to go from, let's say, Chinese to Armenian, and can't find a Chinese-to-Armenian translator, but you can find a translator to go from Chinese to English and another to go from English to Armenian? Does this 3-language process have a name? Has anyone done any research into it's effectiveness?
Is it ethical to offer to translate odd language pairs when you know that the work will be done by two translators via an intermediate language? Does the client need to be told? How do you review the finished work for accuracy? Do large agencies ever use this 3-language process?
It seems that it could be the only way to get work done between little-used pairs like Yoruba-to-Fijian, but if it is effective in transfering the meaning of the source language to the target language--assuming that both translators are fully competent--then why not handle the widely used pairs (English-to-Spanish, for example) this way? I am very interested in getting your input on these questions.
Books like "The Little Prince" (originally written in French) have been translated into many languages. Were they all translated directly from the original French? Protocol suggests that they should have been, but if there is an English translation that is deemed excellent, why couldn't it be the basis for translations into other languages?
Maybe that's a bad example. Let's think of the "Popol Vuh", the Mayan book of history and legends. How could it ever appear in, let's say, Turkish, if not via English or SPanish? Or must we, to be ethical, wait until a Mayan-to-Turkish translator handles the job?
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