WHAT SHOULD A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR-BEGINNER KNOW Everybody’s experience is unique, of course, but personally I will never forget my first translation job. During the translation theory classes we studied a great deal of texts dealing with politics, tried to interpret newspaper articles, analyzed their stylistic peculiarities and vocabulary, but never discussed the plan of actions of a translator when receiving a translation job. In this article we would like to share our experience with our young colleagues and single out a few basic stages of work with a text for translation. So, you have decided to start your freelancing career and received your first commercial order. The first thing you have to do is to define the topic of the text to correctly identify its target audience, i.e. to find a READER of your translation. Let’s take, for example, a simple magazine article about a bench show describing the experience of its participant. The text is likely to be simple without complicated sentence structures, but very likely to be full of expressions conveying emotions and personal judgments. Be ready for comparisons and metaphors, as well as informal vocabulary. Here you will have to remember a lot of colloquial expressions and be a person of wide reading (but this is surely the baseline for mastery of any foreign language, without extensive reading you will not get too far). But let’s come back to our target reader. Most likely this article will be interesting for visitors of bench-shows and owners of pets, meaning people of any age and level of education. Being aware of this, we, the translators, have to do our best to make our translation comprehensible and easy. It will be a plus if we reduce the length of some sentences, change their form and simplify them to some extent… But it is out of the question to distort the meaning, add own ideas, etc. After completion of translation you have to reread the source text, and your translation. It is recommended to switch your attention to some other activities for a short while, and then come back to proofreading again. Before handing over your translation to the customer you have to reread your final variant very attentively and then very quickly. Imagine that you are a representative of the target audience. Think whether you like the article, how easy, and understandable it sounds. Finally, we would like to recommend you to avoid a line-by-line translation and a wish to convey the sense of every single detail. Do not be afraid of changing the structure of a source text. Aim at readability; do not forget about correct punctuation marks. And it will always be a plus if you get familiarized with the topic of your translation, read similar articles in the internet before you translate… Translenta Translation Agency wishes you luck, our dear colleagues!
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 23:15:38 +0000
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