Every new skill has a learning curve, and results are usually proportionate to the amount of time invested in study and practice. Learning how to do written translation is no exception. However, there are ways to accelerate learning, to make it quicker and more efficient.
Some general examples are:
- Online instruction that eliminates the time required to travel to and from a classroom;
- Opportunities to ask questions;
- Focused exercises to help you apply what you have learned;
- Individual feedback and evaluation.
In the last blog post, we talked about an alternative to lengthy and expensive university translation training. You have already done the hard work of learning a second language, and you may not be in a position to take the “long way around” to becoming great at written translation. Maybe you need to be able to translate very soon so that you can volunteer for a nonprofit, or earn extra income.
So let’s speed up the process! There is another secret to accelerated learning: being guided through a change in thinking that causes you to approach something differently. We call this a paradigm shift.
While doing doctoral research with my nonprofit translation team, I recognized some faulty thinking patterns in translators who had not yet received adequate training. These patterns were causing them to make similar types of translation errors.
I discovered that 9 paradigm shifts were necessary for bilinguals to become good written translators. For each of these, I identified a “best practice”, a translation strategy that helped them quickly acquire translation skills.
When I applied this breakthrough research with summer students translating into French, they made significant improvement in just 6 weeks. That’s accelerated learning!
A few months ago, I completed a beta test of this training with several Spanish translators to fine-tune it. That’s when I realized I needed to make this alternate method of training translators more widely available. This paradigm-based training works for translation in any language!
The « Think Like a Translator » online course is almost ready! In just a couple of weeks, you will find out how to get access to it.
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
www.LearnTranslation.com
www.NonprofitTranslation.org
