Educators Encourage Proven Translation Techniques To Increase Reliability
Many people don’t understand how mistakes can be made in document translations and this article attempts to provide some of the reasons. Because a translator realizes that translation is subject to error, he talks about translation from inside the process, knowing how it’s done, possessing a practical real-world sense of the problems involved, some solutions to those problems, and the limitations on those solutions (the translator knows, for example, that no translation will ever be a perfectly reliable guide to Because people from academia saw the weakness with which translations were being performed, a need for improved translations was recognized. As more courses were developed and interest grew among students, a growing number of universities began offering complete degrees and in translation studies.
As more German Translation studies programs were developed, a formal curriculum was developed that included a history of translation theory, beginning with the ancient Romans and encompassing key twentieth-century structuralist work. Once coursework in the historical aspects of translation were completed, students would move on to take courses that address common problems in literary translation, medical translation and other forms of legal and scientific translation.
One of the most fundamental lessons in a translation program involves reliability. To put that differently, translation students must know the causes of error because future actions and decisions will be based on the translation. Perhaps the first lesson that students learn is that simple word by word translations have tremendous disadvantages. This is the reason why it is foolish to blindly rely on machine translations to convey the true meaning of a document. These issues are encountered on a regular basis by professional translation workers when dealing with highly technical subject matter like Legal Translation. The following true story attests to the difficult issues encountered by professional translators.
About a decade ago, a junior in a translation program received a Medical Translation internship with a leading research organization that is located in Germany. Although his native language was English, he spent a semester in college at a German university. As you might imagine, the person had excellent English language skills but his German skills were somewhat limited. When his hosts asked him if he was comfortable, he knew how he wanted to respond and he knew the appropriate words for “comfortable,” “hot” and “cold.” He felt confident that if he responded that he was a bit too hot, that the correct meaning would be conveyed. However, as most Anglophones do not realize, in German, it is necessary to say “it is hot to me,” and not, “I am hot.” The two statements carry very different meanings in German. However, once the American’s reply was met with the type of laughter that suggested that he had said something wrong. The American had inadvertently suggested something about romance instead of something about his level of comfort. You can be assured that the American will think twice the next time he thinks about how he might respond in German.