Strongly recommend changing the recommendation from “bilingual people” to “translators.” While many bilingual people are easily able to do casual translation, someone who is actually trained as a translator and who works as a professional translator will generally do a much better job.
Merely being bilingual doesn’t quality someone to be a translator, any more than my ability to use a keyboard qualified me as a stenographer or my ability to ride a bicycle qualifies me to me a bicycle messenger.
I’ll stand by the title here. I think a bilingual person without specific training in translation can have good taste in determining whether or not a given translation is high-quality. These seem like distinct skills, e.g. in English I’m able to recognize a work badly translated from French even if I don’t speak French and couldn’t produce a better one. And having good taste seems like the most important skill for someone who is vetting and contracting with professional translators.
Separately, I also think that many (but not all) bilingual people without specific training in translation can themselves do good translation work. The results of our pilot project moved me towards this view (from a prior position that put a decent amount of weight on it).
As a high-level note, I see the goal here as enabling people to engage with EA ideas where they couldn’t before. It’s important that quality be high enough that the ideas are transmitted with good fidelity. But I don’t think we need to adhere to an extremely high and rigorous standard of the type one might have when translating a literary work, e.g. I don’t think we need translations to read so fluently that one forgets the material was originally written in English. I think this work is urgent and important, and I think the opportunity costs of imposing that kind of standard would be significant.
Adding onto this, it’s also generally accepted that you should only do serious translation work into a language that you speak natively. For instance, an English-German bilingual with German as their native language should not translate German content into English, only English content into German. So what you need are not just people who are fluent in English and some other language, but people who have some other language as their native language.
the quality of the best products produced by EAs and the best products produced by professionals seemed to be about the same, on average, as assessed (blinded) by Guille. This was a small sample assessed by one person, so it doesn’t constitute much evidence.
Strongly recommend changing the recommendation from “bilingual people” to “translators.” While many bilingual people are easily able to do casual translation, someone who is actually trained as a translator and who works as a professional translator will generally do a much better job.
Merely being bilingual doesn’t quality someone to be a translator, any more than my ability to use a keyboard qualified me as a stenographer or my ability to ride a bicycle qualifies me to me a bicycle messenger.
I’ll stand by the title here. I think a bilingual person without specific training in translation can have good taste in determining whether or not a given translation is high-quality. These seem like distinct skills, e.g. in English I’m able to recognize a work badly translated from French even if I don’t speak French and couldn’t produce a better one. And having good taste seems like the most important skill for someone who is vetting and contracting with professional translators.
Separately, I also think that many (but not all) bilingual people without specific training in translation can themselves do good translation work. The results of our pilot project moved me towards this view (from a prior position that put a decent amount of weight on it).
As a high-level note, I see the goal here as enabling people to engage with EA ideas where they couldn’t before. It’s important that quality be high enough that the ideas are transmitted with good fidelity. But I don’t think we need to adhere to an extremely high and rigorous standard of the type one might have when translating a literary work, e.g. I don’t think we need translations to read so fluently that one forgets the material was originally written in English. I think this work is urgent and important, and I think the opportunity costs of imposing that kind of standard would be significant.
Adding onto this, it’s also generally accepted that you should only do serious translation work into a language that you speak natively. For instance, an English-German bilingual with German as their native language should not translate German content into English, only English content into German. So what you need are not just people who are fluent in English and some other language, but people who have some other language as their native language.
What if we have two native tongues?
I was also surprised to read the section “how do EAs compare to professional translators on the quality of the products they produce?” which makes me update slightly towards it not being that much of a deal.