living in (on) translation
Well--I got my first random-check-result report from the translation company I work for, and generally got a good grade, but one comment made me laugh out loud. "This phrase is a remnant of your British English. In American English we wouldn't use this expression...". Nice. Clearly a misspent childhood reading British kids' books had a lasting influence on my unequivocally American self.
Translation for money is a new and remarkable experience. (Precious little of it lately, what with summer and an evilly competitive system, but there you go.) People will pay money to have damn near anything translated, right down to Facebook posts and very intimate chat sessions. Master's theses appear with sources attributed to the author's first name. Mathematical proofs involve Greek letters and logical oddities. One woman posted an innocuous abstract in psychology with the request that it be translated so as to be "as difficult to understand as possible." Occasionally it's tempting to add a note pointing out the author's academic failings, but sadly that is not what one is paid for. Technically translator and client are supposed to be anonymous to one another, but often it's easy to figure out from context the name and position of the people involved. One short piece required, without the client's awareness, a reading knowledge of Korean to figure out a correct spelling. A young woman set out to be Japan's foremost female potato geneticist. During a long essay on the psychology of dog-owners, I kept typing "god-owners" instead. A lady wrote an introductory note of great courtesy to her daughter's parents-in-law.
I usually refuse to take on legal translation, because the whole document has to be written in a particular style, a dialect if you will, and I'm just not qualified. To my surprise, though, medical translation has proved to be more accessible than I thought. I won't do jobs related to individual patients' treatment--if a minor mistranslation is going to screw someone over, I don't want to be the translator responsible--but research papers and abstracts by doctors and nurses are pretty much within my reach. (Who knew, not me: nurses are out there researching like nobody's business. Right on.) The technical terms yield to the application of an online dictionary, and after that it's just a matter of making it grammatical. Almost like solving a puzzle, and satisfying in that way.
If people would pay me to translate novels and historical/sociological nonfiction, I'd be in heaven, but ain't no such luck coming; still, it's fun to mess around with these in my spare time. Language works in your favor the more of it you know.
Translation for money is a new and remarkable experience. (Precious little of it lately, what with summer and an evilly competitive system, but there you go.) People will pay money to have damn near anything translated, right down to Facebook posts and very intimate chat sessions. Master's theses appear with sources attributed to the author's first name. Mathematical proofs involve Greek letters and logical oddities. One woman posted an innocuous abstract in psychology with the request that it be translated so as to be "as difficult to understand as possible." Occasionally it's tempting to add a note pointing out the author's academic failings, but sadly that is not what one is paid for. Technically translator and client are supposed to be anonymous to one another, but often it's easy to figure out from context the name and position of the people involved. One short piece required, without the client's awareness, a reading knowledge of Korean to figure out a correct spelling. A young woman set out to be Japan's foremost female potato geneticist. During a long essay on the psychology of dog-owners, I kept typing "god-owners" instead. A lady wrote an introductory note of great courtesy to her daughter's parents-in-law.
I usually refuse to take on legal translation, because the whole document has to be written in a particular style, a dialect if you will, and I'm just not qualified. To my surprise, though, medical translation has proved to be more accessible than I thought. I won't do jobs related to individual patients' treatment--if a minor mistranslation is going to screw someone over, I don't want to be the translator responsible--but research papers and abstracts by doctors and nurses are pretty much within my reach. (Who knew, not me: nurses are out there researching like nobody's business. Right on.) The technical terms yield to the application of an online dictionary, and after that it's just a matter of making it grammatical. Almost like solving a puzzle, and satisfying in that way.
If people would pay me to translate novels and historical/sociological nonfiction, I'd be in heaven, but ain't no such luck coming; still, it's fun to mess around with these in my spare time. Language works in your favor the more of it you know.