Successful
translators are not made overnight, you have to work hard to be one of them. It
is not only about getting B.A
degree, but there are certain things you should follow if you want to
improve yourself and your ability in translation, I collected these tips for
you from different books and articles, keep them in mind before you start your career in translation:
1- A good translator will use a dictionary and other resources to find
the precise words to express the concepts, terms and ideas in the target
language, but should also remember that such tools are there to assist
only, and cannot do the work for him.
2- Get into the habit of checking yourself on any term you are not 100%
sure of. Check yourself against the opinion of friends, family, and the
internet.
3- Keep up to date with developments and proper terminology through
websites, blogs, magazines, journals and books written in both your source and
target languages. Enjoy the wealth of free resources available online – from
twitter to online newspapers, software, and RSS feeds.
4- Basic computer skills are a must in this job, good, efficient,
reliable software and hardware can make your task a lot quicker and easier.
Typing speed is also very significant.
5- Take notes and study the subject matter in which you will
be required to translate or interpret. For example, if your job is to interpret
at a conference on heart disease, it will be helpful to obtain a copy of the
agenda so that you can research any words or concepts with which you are
currently unfamiliar.
6- Being a translator is not a
job everyone can do. Even being bilingual doesn’t necessarily make you a good
translator. Translation is not simply a matter of looking up words in a
dictionary, one by one – if it were that simple, we could all do it. The reason
why it’s complex is that languages express ideas in different ways – with
different grammatical structures, different word orders and different nuances
of meaning.
A good
translator is one who can understand the “ideas” being conveyed by the source
text, and then reformulate them in the target language so that they sound as if
they had originally been written by a native speaker of the target language. To
do this, the translator needs to have a mastery of both languages and great
flexibility of thought.
7- Do not accept a
project which you know is not within your abilities. It is perfectly
professional to turn down jobs translating highly technical product
specifications or lengthy legalese if you have no experience in those fields.
8- Do not accept jobs with impossible deadlines, the quality
of your work may suffer under the pressure of an unreasonable deadline and
that, in the end, only reflects poorly on you.
9- Do not accept a job without seeing the text first. What
someone might describe to you as a business text may turn out to be medical,
someone might say the text is 1500 words, but then you find its 1500 words of
difficult to read handwriting - nightmare! It's always best to see the text
before committing to it.
10- “Your work is going to fill a
large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what
you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what
you do".
Prepared by: Sahar T. Sulaiman
Sources:
CRAZY TRANSLATION memes are designed by Haneen Skull and Yaser Ahmed)
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