Translation 101: Preparing To Do An Excellent Translation Task
Are you a veteran professional translator, a beginner, or a student with translation assignments to finish? Whichever role you have, a translation task will never be easy. There are lots of points to consider prior and during the task itself.
Prior To Translation
Before thinking of an excellent translating performance, you must first have the basic language skills needed: a wide vocabulary, a sufficient knowledge on grammar rules, and good comprehension ability. Just like in writing an original piece, these language skills are also very crucial in translating texts.
Should you think you already have it all, then it’s time to move on to the next level: the actual translating.
The Translation Task Itself
Any translator should develop some basic fundamental skills needed in translating texts, namely researching skills, analyzing skills, and writing skills.
As for having efficient researching skills, make sure you have the different kinds of dictionaries that you need in your task: bilingual, monolingual, historical, and a lot more types of dictionaries that can help you. In translating texts, you will really need a lot of word list books, depending on the original text’s style.
Regarding text analysis, it goes with understanding the original text. When you have a good understanding, then you know that a text may have more than one meaning, and there comes the need for good analytical skills.
After distinguishing the different meanings of the text, you will need to identify the best meaning that fits into it and you should also recognize the structure in the intended language that best represents the original.
Moreover, a well-translated text should be easily understood by the readers. This goes with having good writing skills. What’s more important is that a translated text should still express the meaning of the original text. One way to do this is by identifying the differences between the figurative statements and the literal ones. Although not at all times, a literally word-for-word translation may produce a bad result.
After following the above suggestions, you may have a great chance of doing an excellent translation task.