Hello again! Last week we talked about how to Respect Context in your translations. The third Best Practice in the Readability area of translation quality is to Be Idiomatic. This means that we must get past the myth that we can follow the original sentence structure of a document when we do the translation. The reality is that each language is unique, and readers expect a text to follow the natural flow of that language.
The best strategy for Being Idiomatic when you are translating is to rearrange words and phrases within sentences so that they flow better in that language. Sometimes you have to remove or add small words. For example, French and Spanish use the definite article (equivalent of “the”) very frequently, but English does not. This needs to be taken into consideration in a translation.
My best tip for Being Idiomatic is to avoid typing your translation into the original document in your word processing software. It’s too easy to miss sentences that way, and it also influences you to keep words in the same order as the original translation. So you should open a new document for the translation, and this will help you have more freedom to move words around and make your translation idiomatic.
So far, we have talked about 3 best practices for Fidelity in translation, and 3 for Readability. Next week, we will introduce the third category of translation quality: Conformity. Stay tuned!
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
