When I decided on a career change, the first thing I looked for was a specific course in the field. Many people think that “knowing English” (or any second language) is enough to start translating, but things aren’t that simple. There are so many things involved in generating a quality version of a text in your language and we see so many language vices, errors perpetuated in literal translations, as well as wrong context, cultural reality crossed over. Translating is an art.
In fact, I think the most important thing in the process is to know your native language. That’s right – amazingly – to be a translator, you have to be excellent in your own language more than in any other language. It’s obvious that you have to know a second language (at least), but that’s not really the focus and it’s not where your greatest efforts should be, but in your own language. And this is why the translator is invisible. They have to create a text that reads as if it was written in their language and not something that “sounds” translated.
That is crucial with literature, for example. Many books you read were written in another language, and you don’t even remember it. You know who the author of the book is, but you don’t always pay attention to who enabled you to read that book: the translator.
Or, going into other areas of translation, when you book your flight ticket, you don’t remember that the website might have been created in another language and arrives to you in your language because it was translated, you choose your hotel without thinking about how that website for a hotel in Paris was written in your language (i.e. it wasn’t….).
The truth is that translation is present in our daily lives much more than we realize or stop to think about. I often see myself as a bridge. I’m a bridge between the manufacturer of a product and its consumer, I’m a bridge between the hotel and the happy traveller on their way, a bridge between the worker at the multinational and the training programme designed in another language and arriving smoothly to their understanding.
I like to be that bridge.