Problems associated with translation
Monday, 3rd August 2009
Translation involves taking a text in one language and producing a version of it in another language. Translation is normally from other languages into the translator’s native language. It is part art and part science, and translators are faced with a variety of challenges.
Translators need an in-depth knowledge of two languages, and need, ideally, to be familiar with the subjects of the texts they are translating. This is especially true for translation in such fields as technology, science, law and medicine. In fact, many translators specialise in a particular field or fields in which they have expertise.
When translating literature, poetry, songs and simliar material translators need to be familiar not only with the two languages involved, but also with the cultures of the people who speak them. One problem literary translators face is what to do with culture-specific references – they could translate them literally and provide footnotes or other explanations for readers not familiar with the source culture, or try to find equivalents specific to the target culture. Translating poems and songs is particularly challenging as not only do you need to translate the words, but you often need to find ones that rhyme as well.
Each language describes the world in a different way. For example, the colour spectrum is a continuum with no clear boundaries between the colours, and is divided up differently for different languages. Greek has separate words for light blue and dark blue, while other languages, such as Welsh and Japanese, have words that can mean blue or green, or something in between.
In English there are many verbs of motion that describe the manner of motion – he bounched out of the house and galloped up the street, for example. In other languages such as French and Spanish, you could add a phrase to a simple motion verb, like to go or to run, to describe the motion, but this would feel clumsy and unnatural, so translators would normally omit such descriptions.
Names of people and places are another translation challenge, especially if you’re translating between too very different languages such as Chinese and English. Do you provide English versions of the Chinese names, which are likely to be unfamiliar and difficult to remember for your readers, or do you just transliterate them? If you do the latter, do you put the surname first, as is the custom in Chinese, or last, as in English?
Ideally a translation will read as if it was originally written in the target language. This is hard to achieve, but certainly possible.
Tags: translation, language, languages, tailor-made, italian, german, culture, french, spanish, english
Posted by Simon Ager 2009-08 under Passion for language, Vocabulary,
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Posted by tintin@translation on 06/21 at 08:36 AM
Translations is very important it is a way to communicate with other people, specially those people that has a different dialect, translators well be the frontliners to communicate with them, and to have communication.