Not Lost in Translation
WCD Issues its Overview in Nine Languages

After two years persuading diverse nationalities to agree to the wording of one English language document, WCD spent several weeks persuading that document's words to agree in the language of diverse nationalities.

Easier said than read, perhaps.

But anyone who speaks (honestly, that is) with two tongues knows how the nuance of a word can shift the meaning of a sentence, which can shift the emphasis in a paragraph or meaning of a chapter.

And in a politically charged report that runs for 320 pages or longer, every accent mark (é), ene (ñ) and umlaut (ö) would count.

In French, decommission can translate as either wipe away, dismantle or put out of order.

With no exact Spanish equivalent for some terms, all legitimate stakeholders in becomes todos los legitimamente implicados en which, back to English, reads, all legitimately implicated in. Or entitlements become derechos which returns to rights.

The German word for dam spillway is Hochwasserentlastungsanlage. Quite a mouthful. But nothing compared with compliance sicherstellen der Einhaltung von Verpflichtungen und Vereinbarungen (to secure the observing of obligations and agreements) or environmental flows - ökologische Restwassermenge (ecological remaining water amount). Even the German for dam evolves with size or make (see below).

In Chinese the same character means either opportunity or crisis, (which aptly and concisely describes the reaction of many to the WCD Report).

Translation can empower, but doing so makes some tremble.

South Africa has 539 large dams and 11 official languages. In Pretoria, its capital, WCD Chair Kader Asmal joked that, "when I was told all I had to do, for this speech, was translate the report into Afrikaans, Ndebele, Sepedi, Sesotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu as well, I almost resigned on the spot, one day early!"

There are 5,000 languages in the world. Papua New Guinea alone, where 16 MW of hydro capacity is planned, speaks 3,000 of them. Let the tongue untwisting begin.

World Commission on Staudämme, Talsperren, Wehre, or Stauanlagen?

Exerpts of Nov. 28 letter on German translation from Hon. President of ICOLD Wolfgang Pircher (with his permission).

"The reason why I am writing you already today...concerns the wording of the title in German, or rather the use of the word Staudamm. Please note that not all dams are Staudamme, this term being reserved in technical German exclusively to the group of embankment dams.

"The other group, concrete and masonry dams, is denoted Staumauern. Their common generic term is Talsperren. The word Talsperre involves the notion of a certain size (corresponding at least to the ICOLD definition of large dams), but it does, strictly speaking, not apply to lowhead river barrages (barrages mobiles in French), which as you may know are called Wehre.

"The generic term of both Talsperren and Wehre would be Stauanlagen, but this is not a very colloquial, but rather academic term. Therefore, the Austrian, German and Swiss National Committee of ICOLD call themselves simply Nationalkomitee für Talsperren, and I would suggest you also to use just the word Talsperren instead of Staudämme and Grossstaudämme in the German version of the Summary and the Report. "