Your–translation!

About translation

Translation is a passion and a profession. Probably in that order. Translators are often trained in other professions before they start translating, which is certainly true for me.

I find it very important to understand what I am translating – otherwise I could not do it.

If we are talking about an engine or a machine in a factory, I put myself in the place of the engineer or the operator working on it. Would I understand it? If there are problems with the original manual (the source text) I always ask my clients. Nothing is worse than an ambiguous instruction in a manual which is then repeated in all the translated manuals. An added difficulty in technical translation is consistency throughout the translations. One concept, a specific tool, an engine part, may be correctly translated by four different words. Each manufacturer tends to have its own terminology. Luckily, we have translation memory tools to be able to ensure consistency throughout the translation. There's one on my computer screen on the photo!

Legal texts are even more of a challenge. Specific legal concepts may exist in one language but not in the other language. Unfortunately, legal translation between Dutch and English does not have the resources that are available between Spanish and English. The same difficulties arise: a common law system and a civil law system are bound to work with different concepts that are not easy or impossible to translate.

An example of such a concept is the Dutch 'ontbinding' of a contract. Possible translations are: termination, rescission, dissolution, setting aside. The best translation may depend on the context and the actual concept, i.e. in court (employment contract) or out of court.

More musings in my blog
http://your-translation.blogspot.com/

Wikipedia about translation

Translation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language – the source text – and the production, in another language, of a new, equivalent text – the target text, or translation.

Traditionally, translation has been a human activity, although attempts have been made to automate and computerize the translation of natural-language texts –machine translation – or to use computers as an aid to translation – computer-assisted translation.

The goal of translation is generally to establish a relation of equivalence of intent between the source and target texts (that is to say, to ensure that both texts communicate the same message), while taking into account a number of constraints. These constraints include context, the rules of grammar of both languages, their writing conventions, their idioms, and the like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation