Translation Advice for New Translators
As a novice translator, a great deal of responsibility rests upon your shoulders; your work will directly reflect upon the professionalism of yourself and the agency that you work for. Additionally, the translation that you undertake might well have mission critical implications for your client and must be well executed; moreover, the standard of your work might very well determine whether you receive further commissions. To carry out a successful translation, there are certain criteria that your work must exhibit...let us look at some of these now:• The translation must be easy to understand. Many novices have a tendency to be over verbose and complicate their work unnecessarily; this is to be avoided at all cost.
• The translation must read well...in other words, it must be fluent and smooth.
• The translation must capture the style of the target language, its modes of speech and its expressive constructs.
• The translation should mirror some of the literary style of the original.
• A good translation will capture and convey the backdrop against which the work was written.
• Lastly and most obviously, the translation must pass on the core meaning of the original text.
Now that we have a set of criteria that make a good translation, let us look at some of the skills that will be needed to achieve them:
• Understanding the source text. A thorough comprehension of the work to be translated is essential; as with any form of comprehension, several readings will be required.
1. The first reading will be to get the general idea of the theme of the text and to capture some of the main points.
2. The second reading will be to fill in the detail of the text.
3. A subsequent reading might be required to recap and acquaint oneself with the style and tone of the text.
• Follow - up research. Having gained an understanding of the source text, a good translator will always incorporate some amount of research into his work. This research might relate to technical terms that he is unfamiliar with, determining the meaning of a vocabulary term that he is unsure about or just some background study to help formulate a more complete understanding of the subject at hand.
• Compositional ability. Having absorbed the source text, understood it throughout and gained a measure of researched backup information, this must be collated and formed into a cohesive finished product.
Were you to engage an agency to undertake a language translation in the UK you would see that the objective criteria and translational methodology outlined above are part and parcel of the skill set of every professional translator; by mastering this skill set, you will be well on your way to joining their ranks.
Ioana Mihailas is a linguist for Lingo24, a translation company in London UK. | Article Source
tags: New Translators, advice for new translators, starting a translation career
