Discussion on Lantra-L, December 10, 1996 [obsolete link]:
Doug Robinson:
The term "end-user" implies a chain that comes to some definite end. But does the chain of users EVER come to an end? Well, yes, potentially. I've had private individuals pay me to translate something for their own use. They were the client, agency, intermediary, and end-user. They read it and put it in their desk drawer. But what if, ten years later, something comes up in conversation that makes them think of that translation I did and they go get it and show it to a friend. Is this friend now the end-user? And the friend shows it to another friend, etc. Valeria's colleague might have been the end-user in that particular situation. But who knows about the future?
Maybe it would make sense not to talk about END-users. Maybe all we have is users of various sorts. Some we meet, speak to on the phone, dun for late payments, etc., and call "agencies" or "clients," others we just imagine and call "end-users." But that's just a way of talking, a handy shorthand for a much more complicated social/professional process.
Haydn Rawlinson:
Food for thought here. I think the best approach is to see the user generically, not on an individual level. Thus: the user is that reader or class of readers for whom the translator is to be a transparent intermediary standing in the place of the original writer--the whispering voice between the two. They are the readers of the magazine the article is published in, the audience listening to the speech, the 13-year-old who saves up his pocket money to buy the computer game and its manuals. In the examples offered previously by both Valeria and Phil, their understanding of the "end-user" did not, strictly, correspond to this definition.
A translation agency (or direct client looking simply to publish your xlation somewhere) would not, in this sense, generally be considered a user; it's merely another step in the intermediation process, one with a different set of expectations regarding your xlation: definitely a non-user outlook. The user (or users) can then be considered a largely homogeneous group, or at least one with more in common with each other than with the agency aspect of the intermediary function.
Maybe this distinction isn't particularly useful for most translators out there; for me, as a xlator going into a TL which is not the national language (nor, by the same token, the language of the agency/client), it does put a different slant on things. The high level of institutional identification between my clients/agencies and the ST writers doesn't help much either. I think one or two members of the Swedish contingent (Ro?) on Lantra have said similar things in the past: presumably the into-English gang in Sweden is in a similar situation.
Valeria Opazo:
I agree with Haydn. I envisage the end-user as an entity which is present while I'm translating (the implied reader?). When that entity becomes an actual client or user it no longer belongs to my experience of translating that text. I think I conceive of the "user" as part of the process not as end actually.
Food for thought.
Comments:
An "entity which is present," Valeria writes. Not a spiritual entity, presumably. But the parallel is suggestive. Certainly an "ideal" or "imaginary" entity that nevertheless wields, or seems to wield, or is thought to wield, significant power over the act of translating. "Present," and "part of the process," but only "belongs to my experience of translating that text" when not "actual." Virtual vs. actual? Imaginary/ideal/mythic vs. real? Disembodied vs. embodied? Haydn prefers to draw the distinction between the "generic" and the "individual": "the user is that reader or class of readers for whom the translator is to be a transparent intermediary standing in the place of the original writer -- the whispering voice between the two." The user, as Valeria also says, is the implied reader, Wolfgang Iser's term; the translator imagines this "nonexistent" or "mythical" entity as someone with the power to imagine the translator as a "transparent intermediary standing in the place of the original writer." The user is an invisible entity with which the translator renders herimself transparent. The implied reader becomes the translator's conjuring tool and the force that conjures the translator into being.
Of course, we hasten to add, this is all just an illusion. The user isn't really an entity at all; just a figment of the translator's imagination. And the translator imagines that figment not in order to become transparent in physical fact, but to generate the illusion of transparency--and of intermediacy, and in-the-place-of-the-original-writerness.
