An old seating plan for a cinema in Germany has two rows of stalls crossed out in pencil. A printed programme lists a Saturday concert by a school choir, and in an interview the projectionist describes wheeling a piano into the space usually taken up by seats. Imagine a local history group in London making an English booklet from these three German sources. Its readers can put two and two together when the English texts show where each detail comes from.
Dialektikus UK Ltd translates written material from German into English. If several texts will appear together in a publication, on a display or online, send them as a set and explain how you plan to use each one. The booklet might reproduce the plan and programme at a reduced size, with room for a few lines of English beside each. A longer extract from the written interview transcript can give the projectionist space to explain how the cinema came to be used for concerts.
Credit each source
Suppose the programme dates the advertised concert to 14 May. If that date appears under the seating plan too, a reader may assume the pencil marks were made that day. It is easy to jump to conclusions when one source happens to give a date precise enough to put on a timeline. Use the date beside the programme extract and describe the marks in the note that accompanies the plan. If you can establish a connection between the records, explain it in the booklet’s commentary.
The layout of the programme can do some of the talking. A school name in large type might head a whole page of performances, with each venue and date in smaller print. If you are reproducing a single entry, send the full page and mark the entry you have chosen. A crop that begins at the concert title may leave out the school name, and a separate heading may show that several performances on the page were all part of the same festival.
Make the plan readable
A numbered key can take the guesswork out of matching an English label to a place on the seating plan. When the booklet reproduces the German plan, the key can identify the stalls and the balcony and explain the wording next to the two rows. Send the whole plan and, if the lettering is small, a close-up. An arrow that seems to point to the end of a row in a cropped image might mark the entrance to an aisle on the full sheet.
A note in the margin can hide in plain sight when readers are looking at the rows in the centre of the sheet. Point out any handwriting you would like translated. With ‘reserved’ pencilled beside six seats, the position of the word tells readers which seats someone meant to set aside. If the margin will be cropped for the published image, indicate which of its notes should appear in the accompanying English text.
Keep the spoken voice
The projectionist’s account has a different rhythm from the programme. Someone telling the story might pause to recall who came to help, then get carried away describing how they manoeuvred the piano round the tight bend by the side door. The translation can make room for that burst of detail. If the extract starts in the middle of the anecdote, share the preceding lines too, especially when a pronoun such as ‘they’ depends on a name mentioned in the previous answer.
When a joke depends on the interviewer’s question, consider printing the question or choosing a longer quotation with room for the set-up. If a quotation will appear on a separate display panel, a line introducing the speaker can help visitors get their bearings. Knowing that the speaker worked in the projection booth gives a reader some context for a comment about being able to see the piano from the back of the hall.
Someone who knows the building like the back of their hand might say ‘the little door’ and expect the interviewer to know which side of the screen it is on. A brief introduction or a reference to the plan can help the reader follow that shorthand. If the cinema once had a local name that appears in the transcript, tell us how the booklet will introduce it and whether it also appears on the original programme.
Check the booklet in use
Think about where individual pieces might appear on their own. If an extract from the programme will go online, give readers enough information to identify the cinema and the event even if they have never seen the booklet. A reference such as ‘opposite’ may work in print and send readers on a wild goose chase online. The name of the image or the section heading is easier to find, particularly when someone is reading on a phone and can see only part of a page at once.
A reader might turn from the programme to the plan to locate the seats, then go to the interview to find out who moved them. Give each reference a destination they can recognise on the page. Once the layout is set, a fresh pair of eyes can follow the route using the English alone. They might find that a line still points to the seating plan on page nine although the image has moved to page eleven.
The plain text version of a booklet may need its own description of an image. A numbered key helps someone looking at the seating plan put an English name to each part of the hall. A reader who is listening to the text needs to hear where the pencilled lines are. If you are preparing a description as well as a key, include both in the brief and show how readers will reach them. The position of those lines matters when the interview refers to the seats nearest the screen.
Ask about your translations
To discuss a set of German to English translations, email Dialektikus UK Ltd at london@dialektikus.co.uk or use our contact page. Tell us what you are preparing, which texts need an English version and what readers will have alongside them. If you already know the space available for a label or extract, include those limits in your enquiry. A draft layout can show where the pieces fit, even if the images and page numbers are still provisional.