Hello, I hope your week has gone well! Last week we talked about how to Turn off Autopilot in your translations. The second Best Practice in the Readability area of translation quality is to Respect Context. This means that we must get past the myth that the first suggestion in a bilingual dictionary is the one we should use. The reality is that the only way to know the full meaning of a word is to look at it in context.
The best strategy for Respecting Context when you are translating is to consult reference tools and reliable websites. Use these to carefully choose the best word, term or expression for the context. It’s also important to consider cultural context, as words and expressions can have different meanings or nuances in various regions or countries. A word that is acceptable in one place might be offensive somewhere else.
My favourite tool for checking words and expressions in context is Linguee.com. It offers huge databases of parallel sentences in many languages. Just make sure you avoid the “DeepL” feature (machine translation) unless you have been trained in how to do post-editing and are working on a technical document where style and emotion are not important.
When you use Linguee, type the expression in the original language to see what suggestions are offered. (If you type it in the language you are translating into, you risk finding suggestions of bad translations….) Then, look at several in context and choose the one that fits your translation best.
Next week, we will talk about another best practice: Be Idiomatic.
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
