Translating Authorial Voice in Scientific and Technical Prose

Last November, I posted an article[1] on the difficulty of translating administrative prose from French to English.  The examples given were “Guidelines on Completing IRS form 940” in (American) English, and “Lettre du Ministère de l’Intérieur, sous-direction de la circulation et de la sécurité routière » in French. The striking differences in style between these two texts are essentially due to what translation theorists call “authorial voice” and “intersubjectivity”.

The former term refers to explicit references to the author of the text, such as the use of the first-person singular pronoun instead of the impersonal form, the passive voice or the authorial we. Here are some examples of this from Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, as discussed by Francesco Baggio[2].

No one, to my knowledge, has ever been arrested for…

Take a more subtle example I have experienced in real life…

As far as I can see…

This, I believe, is the real nature of the concept…

Intersubjectivity involves addressing the reader directly, appealing to a common ground of experience and beliefs, as with the use of the personal we below, again from Pinker’s book.

We need to know what “face” is and why we have emotions like embarrassment, shame…

What logicians call “epistemic modality”, that is, indications of the speaker’s position towards the truth of a proposition, can also participate in this.

I’m sure a merchant listening to an advisory from…

I think this is being used as a signal…

I suspect that’s a different emotion…

In theory, scientific, technical or administrative prose should not involve “authorial voice” or “intersubjectivity” at all.  To quote F. Baggio (2006:75): scientific research is presumed to be “a purely empirical and objective process [where] human agency is not part of the action and as such has no right to be present in the description of indisputable and replicable facts”. As for technical writing in general, Jasper Neel[3] has this to say:

The technical writer […] writes in a densely structured, highly determined environment. […] While the writer must make frequent decisions about order and emphasis as well as about what the reader already knows, « topic » and « focus » are rigidly controlled.  Company guidelines […] largely determine what the final document will look like. The task analysis and usability testing stages in the company’s standard documentation procedure give the writer both a rigidly determined mandate and a clear evaluation of the text’s successes and failures. […] the syntactic style has already been set, leaving little room for significant modification. A company editor will read the final text to ensure that it looks and sounds like other company publications.

Therefore, when translating scientific, technical or administrative documents, one shouldn’t have to address these problems. Nonetheless, problems of “style”, “voice” and “intersubjectivity” do arise in some cases, for at least two reasons.

First, there may exist important differences in attitude towards authorial presence from one language community to another, especially between English, and French or Italian speaking readers, although the enormous cultural pressure exerted by American publishing norms and writing practices has tended to reduce the stylistic gap between these communities in recent years.

Secondly, the degree of subjectivity may vary significantly within a given field, for instance between a purely technical report among experts at one end of the scale, and a popular review for the general public at the other. While Pinker’s book would probably be included in the latter rather than the former group, thus explaining the high degree of authorial presence, Baggio nevertheless sees it as an example of growing trend towards self-promotion in a highly competitive field where it has become more and more important to “demonstrate the presence of an individual innovative contribution to the scientific community” (p. 75). Hence a general increase in what Roman Jakobson[4] called the “phatic” function, that is, the use of language to establish a social relationship, rather than to communicate information, as when two neighbors exchange remarks about the weather.

Nonetheless, as clearly shown by the two administrative texts discussed in the November post, there remain significant differences in attitude towards authorial presence among language communities, which must be dealt with by the translator. I won’t go back over the case discussed in that post but rather look at some examples of how Pinker’s prose could be translated into French or Italian.

Translating such a text into these Romance languages involves adjusting the style to reader’s expectations in those communities. As a rule, they expect more formality, more complex syntax and greater distance between reader and author. Therefore, one would not normally find things like ellipsis, direct questions, sentences between brackets, exclamatory sentences, direct speech and first-person singular pronouns, exactly the kinds of things that Pinker’s text is full of. Instead, they would favor the passive voice, the impersonal mode, plural and impersonal pronouns, much like the French “Traffic Violations” text discussed in the November article.

So, translating Pinker’s text into French or Italian would involve, not only changes in language, but also a change in style, moving from the “literary” genre to the more formal “scientific” genre of discourse. If the translator were to ignore this constraint, he/she would probably produce a text which would not be taken seriously by the French or Italian reading public, but also which would introduce implicatures not present in the original. Below are some of the strategies recommended by F. Baggio to avoid such unwanted results.

• Changing the first-person singular into the first-person plural pronoun, thus “keeping the sense of ‘close distance’ between reader and writer, but avoiding a personal claim” (p. 82):

To my knowledge > per quanto ne sappiamo / dans la mesure où nous pouvons le savoir

• Changing the first-person singular pronoun into a passive or impersonal mode. “This will make the text marginally less informal than the English text”:

I offered some examples > sono stati presentati alcui esempi / certains exemples ont été présentés

• « Completely erasing the verb and replacing it with an adverbial phrase, especially when the sentences regard general truths…or when it would appear redundant”:

The examples with which I began the chapter > Gli esempi all-inizio del capitolo / les exemples donnés au début du chapiter

• >Maintaining the first-person singular pronoun “when the author’s personal opinion is expressed as a means for self-promotion”:

This, I believe, is the real nature… > Sono convinto che quest sia la vera natura… / Je suis persuadé que la quête est la vraie nature de…

The problem of « voice », and more generally of the degree of subjectivity in translation is a complex one, which I will not pursue any further here. Those interested are invited to consult Chapter 7 in A Linguistic Handbook of French for Translators and Language Students, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2018.

[1] You can read the complete text at laboitealangues.com, under the heading “Traduction”.

[2] F. Baggio (2006) « Authorial Voice in Scientific Writing: Stephen Pinker’s books and their Italian translation as a case study”, Mots Palabras Words 7; 71-88.

[3] Neel, Jasper (1992) « Dichotomy, consubstantiality, technical writing, literary theory: the double orthodox curse”, Journal of Advanced Composition, JSTOR Online Journal, 305-320.

[4] Roman Jakobson (1960) « Linguistics and Poetics » in Thomas Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language, 350-377, Cambridge MA, MIT Press.