subject: Things To Observe Before And While Carrying Out A Translation Project [print this page] Are you a professional translator, a beginner, or a student who has to complete some translation projects? Whatever role or job you have, the call to accomplish a translation task will never be easy to respond to. You must consider lots of things ahead of and while doing the actual task.
Prior To Translation
Before wanting to do an excellent translating performance, you should first have the fundamental language skills needed: wide vocabulary, sufficient knowledge on grammar rules, and excellent comprehension ability. Just like writing an original piece, these language skills are as well needed in translating texts.
Should you think you have it all, then it's time to begin the next step: the actual translating.
Completing The Translation Task
Any translator must have some basic translating skills which are as follows: writing skills, analysis, research skills.
In order to have better researching skills, you may need to use several types of dictionaries: historical, monolingual, bilingual, and other types which can be helpful. You will really need various word list books in translating texts, based on the original text's style.
Regarding text analysis, it needs to go with the right comprehension of the original text. Should you understand texts well, then you know that they can have various meanings, and as for this, you should have excellent analytical skills.
After identifying a particular text's different meanings, you will need to determine the best connotation, and you also need to recognize the structure in the intended language that best represents the original.
Furthermore, possible readers should easily understand a well-translated text. For this reason, exceptional writing skills will be needed on your part. In addition to that, the original text's meaning should still be conveyed in the translated piece. One way to do this is by distinguishing the differences between the literal statements and the metaphorical ones. A literally word-for-word translation generally leads to a bad result, although not all the time.
Should you do the above suggestions, you may now be ready to perform a good translation task.