Translators Role In Clarifying Some Misconceptions
The word translation means at least two different things (making such a distinction is often called disambiguation):
The activity of translating
The product called the translation of an original document.
Disambiguation is needed because dictionary entry words are produced by decontextualization, which is now considered counterproductive to learning and translating: this is why corpus linguistics and concordances are so popular today.
Translation is a complex mental and physical activity of creation and authorship usually performed under a number of constraints, an output operation, the result of which is a translation, the output itself, in practice a text in a human language deemed to be equivalent to another text used as input for the operation""by a competent translator and a competent client.
Translation is also a business service provided, similarly to appraisals, another business service with which translation seems to share some core similarities. Appraisers work on the basis of fair market values.
The analogies must be clear with emphasis here on competent players, i.e. a competent client and a competent translator in terms of knowing the translator trade, and the text, the context, and the relevant chunks of realia in both languages and cultures, etc.
In operative terms translation is transformation, transfer, recursion or rewriting to meet certain new criteria for a text message to work in another language and environment, including culture.
For example, it is nearly always normal not to keep the original title of a book, film, poem or a model name of a product, etc. when the product is to be introduced elsewhere. Most of these titles are not generated by considering the words in the original title; instead, they follow the rules of name-giving, the last exercise in the process of localization.
This is not the only example that shows how unfortunate are the practice of producing paper-based dictionaries with single-word entries, based on the assumption that a word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. In fact, this is not true, and certainly it is a very deplorable way of translating texts believing that a translator needs to find a single word to fit in some missing sense. And most embarrassingly, the fact that a thing is called what you find in a dictionary is a very poor excuse. But this issue is another broad subject that I am not going to discuss here both for lack of space and for the sake of concentrating on the original topic of meaning.
So coming back to the practice of translating, changing, or transcribing some part of the input text is done by following a number of conventions that are or may be written down for a particular producer of a particular class of texts.
If meeting such conventions is a prerequisite to submitting any text for publication, then they are reasonably called standards, which may be industry-wide, meaning the publishing industry rather than the translating industry, which is too diverse to appear as one block of market players of identical interests. Therefore a recent publication of Translation Standards seems to be far from that type of document.
Natural languages are context-sensitive as, opposed to machine or programming
languages, which are not. In other words: the vocabulary and grammar rules of context-free languages are unambiguous to the processor which parses, translates, and produces an output""at another level of a machine language.
The names of objects, concepts, and other entities that we need to give names to be just titles, headings or labels, or clusters of words. We have other representations of such items that seem to be taken for granted or known, such as visual, audio, or complex representation. Yet they are more difficult to sort into an accessible classification system, while books and printed matter have a long-standing, albeit imperfect, system of classification. They are an excellent resource for secondary utilization; for example, the UDC (Universal Decimal Codes) system is an excellent identifier the documents in a way that reflects our current knowledge of reality. This is usual with all sciences where an inventory of the subject matters is created, either based on a morphological (alphabetical) classification, or on the sorting criteria resulting in nomenclatures of all sorts. All we need to keep in mind is that to identify anything in this living world or the universe we need spatial and temporal identifiers, usually numbers or coordinates, and the same is true about man-made artifacts, whether real and tangible or imagined and intangible. Therefore whether words or numbers, they are just names or pointers to locate where the given object or property, in short, knowledge, is to be recalled from. But that calls for a better clarification of what meaning really is and what really words stand for. And let us remember: we have a pattern to search any information, and this pattern happens to be a single alpha string on the Internet, where in fact all the index records are ultimately identified as numbers.
So the lesson is that you either have an alpha order that makes no sense, or a numeric order that may suggest some relationship as in a thesaurus, but none of them are useful enough for the time being for translation purposes.
The translation as a finished product is subject to evaluation, assessment and criticism, all deploying some form of ideal model to compare the actual work delivered. Therefore we need to define quality first, and then the standards used in the comparative operation themselves.
Quality in general is a judgment resulting from comparing something done to something desired to be done. With respect to translation, we work with two significant factors: speed of delivery and accuracy of the finished product""defined as the equivalence of the two texts, and meaning the ratio of "
translation errors" in comparison with an ideally well-formed product.
The quality of translations
The meaning for the term quality has developed over time. Various interpretations suggest that it can be a numeric indicator, especially with so many text processing software tools available.
In conclusion, the problem as a translator is that we do not translate a word, but the longest sequence or cluster of words that makes sense when checked against two realities.
Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world-wide.
by: carmen
On Best Of That To Empire Of Miscellania Missions Why To Choose A Web Design Company In Mumbai Clarifying Significant Elements In Web Hosting Review Tips For Web Designers The Importance Of Working With A Skilled Web Designer Avail Professional Web Development Services In Orange County Get Trendy With Web Design Experts What To Look For When Deciding On An Ecommerce Web Development Firm For Your Company Affordable Web Design Companies How To Choose The Most Qualified Professional Web Design Company What Is The Meaning Of Unlimited Web Hosting? Is It Unlimited Or Are There Any Hidden Implications? Why Seo Articles Are Essential For Improving Web Presence Advancement In Technology Has Aided To The Betterment Of Web Development