This series is proving to be therapeutic after some house renovations… basically, we are drawing parallels to help us internalize 9 best practices for translation, as we “renovate” texts.
The final best practice in the quality aspect of fidelity, Best Practice 3 is “Check Your Logic”. During our renovation, there were many times I just had to scratch my head and take a deep breath. After spending hours painting floor and window trim the appropriate colour for each space (AND labelling each piece!), one of the construction workers put white trim in the beige room, and beige trim in the green room. That left green trim for the white room. It was an exercise in patience for sure… as we then had to paint it after installation, which meant a lot of taping, etc. that should have been unnecessary. But that’s what happens when you don’t think logically.
In order to have Fidelity in our translation, we must remember that a translation is only useful if it is clear and easily understandable. Part of our responsibility as translators is to make the readers’ job easier: they shouldn’t have to read a sentence several times to understand it.
Here are four keys to making sure your translation is logical.
- COMPARE your translation to the original document and make sure it matches. Did you find any logic errors in the original document that need to be corrected in the translation?
- READ your translation out loud, paying close attention to be sure you can follow the train of thought, and that there are no leaps in logic. If there is a step-by-step process described, visualize yourself following these steps. Are they in the right order?
- CHECK TERMINOLOGY in your translation. Have you used the most accurate translation for these terms and have you used terminology consistently so the reader is not confused?
- VARIOUS LOGIC ISSUES to check: titles, sources, names, verb tenses, mathematical calculations, dates, metaphors, idioms, etc.
A complete discussion about logic in translations would take more space than we have in this blog, but this gives you a general strategy to follow! In the next blog post, we’ll being discussing best practices in the quality aspect of Readability.
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
www.LearnTranslation.com
www.NonprofitTranslation.org
