Back-Translation

It’s the process of translating a document that has been translated into a target language, back into the source language. This process is also known as reverse translation.

Why and When is back-translation necessary?

In certain industries, this is a required validation method (drug protocols, psychiatric evaluations, medical equipment instructions, etc.). In most cases, when the client doesn’t know the target language/s this method supposedly provides the customer with some degree of "added security."

In cases where back-translation is a requirement, sometimes of an official nature, it is a very complex, time-consuming and expensive process. In short, this is much more of what the regular everyday client, translation agency or corporation needs or wants to deal with.

Some translation agencies offer this process as an added security or extra quality control, "…working in teams, back-translating" for accuracy, with a third translator proofreading to ensure a smooth, graceful target text."

Also, this is a practice used to somehow recover a lost original which has been translated. The same method is used in music, when there is a transcription of a work for a particular instrument, but the original has been lost, then a re-transcription back to the original instrument could be very useful.

The fist time I heard about "back-translation," an exemplary mess ensued from the conversation with my client, in this case of Asian origin, whose English was totally unintelligible.

-We have problem with back-translation of your translation and we want you to check it again –said the client.

-back-translation? What is that? –I asked, surprised, while grabbing a dictionary hoping to find the answer.

-Oh, you translate in reverse mode. After you translate the document, we send it to another translator to put back into English.

-Hmmm, very interesting indeed, but why did you want me to translate something into Spanish if you will ultimately have somebody else putting it back into English. I still don’t get it…

-No, no, no –said the client. Process doesn’t finish there, my dear. After back-translator puts it back into English, you receive the document again to check his/her comments, and you modify your translation accordingly, where needed, to make sure that everything is right. You file a copy, swear to God that it’s accurate to the best of your knowledge and belief. Then we send it back to the back-translator and…

Hold on, please, hold on. First, let’s not put God into this equation. Secondly, it’s only 9.a.m, and I had had only one coffee pot, ergo, I am not yet fully awake, and I still don’t get it. Wouldn’t it be better to have just another editor, two editors, three maybe, who knows, four?

-Not the same, not the same, back-translator does not edit, back-translator does not proofread!! Back-translator translates back into English and if back-translation looks like original, then everything is fine.

-Oh my God! -and after that the client files for Chapter 11, I thought.

-But you said you didn’t want to involve God! –shouted the client on the other side of the line, now getting angry at me.

-Right, the fish by the mouth dies

-What??? –asked the client.

-Oh, I am already back-translating a saying, el pez por la boca muere. In closed mouth flies don’t get in.

-Whaaaat?? There are no flies here, very clean office -said the infuriated client

-Never mind, I meant that talking too much can be dangerous. –I explained. -Oh Gosh –I continued carefully this time, to avoid more religious confusion- that was another saying that means the same: Shut up.

-How dare you!!! I call you for a job and you ask me to shut up??

I gave up and stopped trying to understand the reasons and the whys and the becauses, and I decided to go with it. I am a translator. Somebody else was going to back-translate me, as far as I know for the first time in my life. The client, one of the major banking institutions in the US, considered that this was the way to validate, approve, assure, guarantee, prove, swear by Mongo that the translated message was accurate, followed the original document, and reflected their ideas.

And so we started to play the "broken telephone" game.

What follows are excerpts from a real back-translation case. For a "sample basting a button…" (back-translate that into Spanish if you want to know what it means). The name of the innocent, as usual, will remain unpublished.

The underlines are mine to point out major problems.

I consider it unnecessary to make comments on the above "back-translation." However, if we wish, we can retranslate the back-translation back into Spanish and see the results. Of course, to keep playing the back-translation game, we can back-translate into English, similarly to what happens when you translate back and forth, from source to target and so on, with Machine Translation

Basically the style of the translation should not be influenced by the fact that there will be a "back-translation." But one could certainly cheat, and follow the English almost line by line and keep thinking back in English while translating. The result will be usually a dry transliteration that sounds rather artificial in the target language. These verbatim translations may get back to the source language in very decent shape. But obviously that is the last and least of our problems… unless the client keeps bugging you because the back-translation doesn’t look like the original document. Also, note that the back-translator shouldn’t have access to the original source text, otherwise the temptation to cheat is too irresistible.

As a translator, my main concern is to provide the client with a good final product in the target language. I don’t want to think how my translation would look back in English. Also, part of our job is to check and review the editor’s and proofreader’s comments and, if necessary, implement them in the document at no additional cost. But what about back-translation?

Reviewing "back-translations" like the one above could be very time-consuming, particularly when you have to justify and explain, to somebody who is not proficient on the target language, why you used certain words, certain style, certain tense, why the back-translator may have interpreted things in a different way (the augury and muddy examples are among the muddiest but clearest). I don’t feel that that is part of my job, or at least I don’t think that it should be included on my translation fee.

We asked some colleagues and clients for their opinion on the subject.

"…In some cases it is a necessary evil. In the work that we do, it is driven by U.S. laws and regulations that pharmaceutical companies are required to comply with, regardless of what we as translators might think of the process. For example, U.S pharmaceutical companies are required to ensure that things like informed consent forms and protocols for clinical trials conducted outside of the U.S. [text missing???] Thus they will have them translated into the language of the country in which the trial will be conducted and then translated back into English for FDA submission. We have been told that the legal departments of many pharmaceutical companies require these translations."

I don’t agree at all with this process. I don’t think that the reliability or quality [of a translation] should be proven by this means.

In a highly formalized context, such as technical descriptions, it might provide a guideline, but when the translation lends itself to a freer style, resorting to idioms or syntactic variations, the reverse translation may distort the original translation. (En un contexto muy formalizado, como descripciones técnicas, por ejemplo, podría servir de guía, pero cuando la traducción se presta a un estilo más libre, que recurre a expresiones idiomáticas o variaciones sintácticas, la traducción inversa puede desvirtuar la traducción original.)

The technique of back-translation has no basis whatsoever, either in linguistics or in the procedures used by human translators. Since there is no syntactic correspondence between original and translation (even if there were, the scientific study of syntax is still in its infancy, despite much progress), back-translation generates a text that says nothing, syntactically or semantically, about the translation or about the original. It should be noted that semantics is not even in its infancy: it simply does not exist as a scientific discipline, so that trying to base an industrial-type quality-control process on it is an utter absurdity.

As is well known, the only way to evaluate a translation is to have it reviewed by an editor who is competent in the subject and a skilled writer in the languages involved. The translator, who is a writer, not a servant or a clerk, let alone a word engineer, produces a text whose relationship to the original is mysterious. A good example is Sergio Pitol’s extraordinary Spanish translation of Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, where the mystery seems totally resistant to analysis. One can easily imagine a ping pong game between Conrad and Pitol in which each writer back-translates the other, with funny and unpredictable results. The point is that such things don’t work even when the two perpetrators are writers of the highest caliber.

In summary, the method of back-translation has no theoretical or practical justification; in fact, it resembles something out of Kafka, or Borges (after all, Borges did translate Kafka, and not badly, but it still sounds like Borges).

Mario Taboada, Translator

The advantages are from the standpoint of the client who requires this form of verification. From the translator’s standpoint, the disadvantages are that he or she may try to stick more closely to the form and words of the source text, and forgoe more appropriate images of the target language.

How will a back-translation influence the style of the translation. In other words, how the translator is preconditioned when he knows that his translation will be submitted to a back-translation process?

In my case, I look for terms that, when back-translated, will agree with the original term.

I think it is a double-edged sword and that its success, in the best of cases, depends on the quality of the translator doing the back-translation. The translator must be very experienced, because otherwise he or she will not capture the subtlety of certain expressions that succeed in communicating the essential meaning of the source text but employ unique conceptual imagery of the target language.

The response might be a protocol for back-translating certain formalized documents, or an explanation concerning the impossibility of succeeding at a back-translation in other cases.

I understand where it comes from, but we also need to have the industry understand our concerns and the way this practice affects our profession.

Is an absolute waste of time and a huge insult to a translator whose career and high degree of accuracy are widely recognized.

I'm not sure I can truly justify back-translation in any case. The major problem is that the persons who seek these out are not sufficiently educated in the translation process and problems, as evidenced by their failure to give detailed instructions on what criteria to use or even tell us this is a back translation in many cases. I have found, moreover, that many times clients, especially the legal depts, do not want extensive translator notes. I have even been given back- translations done by others and asked to remove the translator's notes.

And "por colmo," we are often asked to certify these documents. Definite need for client education here.

Gordon Word Artists

A very ingenious way to charge twice as much or more for the same translation

I think it is a very sophisticated "double-checking" inappropriate for a profession.

…it would be cheaper to hire a good editor.

Also, if they [the clients] think that this is such a good system, they should use it to verify the reliability of machine translation.

It is used to validate the translated text (for instance, a questionnaire for a psychiatric test, an instruction manual for ultrasound equipment [...] and to verify that it [the equipment] works the same way as with the text in the source language.[...] And this is not something that is done with no reason, but with the strict need to guarantee the results.

"It really depends [the advantages/disadvantages] on the type of translation and the degree to which the translator and back-translator have translated "literally." Even so, there is not enough one-to-one correspondence between terms to make back-translation very helpful. It might be somewhat instructive for more technical projects, but generally a reviewer and/or an editor are more helpful, if they're careful.

We advise the client that we think there are better ways to spend his money, e.g., pay for another reviewer/editor."

A back-translation is a waste of time for all involved.

[It] gives the customer, who probably can't read the translation, a sense of security, and lets him pretend he knows what he's getting.

[But] that sense of security is completely false. The back-translation in no way conveys the style of the translation. The back-translator naturally attempts to make the back-translation read as smoothly as possible, and that in no way reflects the quality of the original translation. In particular, there is no way a back-translation can give any idea of how stylish the writing in the original translation might be.

My experience with reverse translations is that they are frustrating for both translators, a waste of time and money for the project manager and useless for the final customer, who still can't read the translation. I have "cheated" when doing back-translations, i.e. when the translation is incomprehensible, I have recourse to the original document, in which case I make absolutely certain the customer knows that there's something that needs to be fixed.

The way to evaluate a translation is to give it to a translator who is a native speaker of the language into which the text has been translated, and ask him to critically and mercilessly evaluate the terminology and style. He'll be able to tell in an instant that he's doing a "back-translation," so you might as well tell him up front so he won't be shy about calling attention to errors or awkward writing.

Controversial as it may be, back-translation is obviously a necessary tool in some cases. It should be handled with extreme care, by the translator, the back-translator and specially the client. If used as a necessary validation of a particular set of instructions or test, not as a "double-check" or evaluation of the translator’s capacity to translate, then l accept it. I believe that, for most of us, our qualifications have been thoroughly checked and verified on a daily basis, by clients, colleagues, peers. If the client does not trust a translator, then he/she should look for a better one, or use another editor. We can’t spend precious hours explaining the grammar structure of a phrase so that the client understands why we use different style, words or tenses than the source language. The answer is simple, we are writing and expressing the text in a different language, so it would almost never be the same.

Sergio Graciano is a Spanish translator who specializes in technical fields, software localization, medicine, medical devices and educational material. He can be reached at: sergio@linguagraphica.com

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