Did you know that being bilingual doesn’t automatically mean you are skilled at doing written translation? I discovered this painfully the first time I tried to translate a document. I understood the ideas, but putting them on paper was not as easy as I thought it would be!
A bilingual person has to go through a process to become a good translator. Over my years of research on translators, translation teams and translation quality, I have found there are three steps involved in this process. Each relates to an area of translation quality.
Let’s start with the first step, which relates to the most important aspect of translation quality, Fidelity. A translation must be faithful to the original document: the content must match.
Step #1 in becoming a translator is to learn to make connections between two languages. During this process, you observe words, expressions, grammar and sentence structure in both languages. Then you make comparisons in your brain: what is the same between the two languages, and what is different?
For example, when we compare adjectives in English and French, we see that:
- In English, adjectives usually go before the noun (a red house).
- However, in French, adjectives usually go after the noun (une maison rouge).
When we compare verbs in English and Spanish, we see that:
- In English, we generally use the subject before the verb (I speak Spanish).
- However, in Spanish, we can often omit the subject before the verb (Hablo español).
Immersion in a language is really helpful to push you past your nervousness about speaking it. But when you give yourself the freedom to compare two languages to cement in your mind their similarities and differences, your language learning takes a big leap forward. A bilingual person who becomes a good translator makes a point of learning detailed language connections, for example:
- False cognates: words that look similar in the two languages, but have completely different meanings;
- Idiomatic expressions that vary: for example counting your chickens before they hatch (in English) is selling the bearskin before killing the bear (in French).
Basically, Step #1 for a bilingual to become a translator involves establishing connections in the brain in order to find the right match between the languages… and that results in a translation that has Fidelity!
Next week, we’ll talk about Step #2 in becoming a translator.
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
www.LearnTranslation.com
www.NonprofitTranslation.org
