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Word translator5/31/2023 ![]() This is an inevitable outcome of the persistent and wrongheaded solitary focus on languageto the exclusion of content. The translation world today appears to be overflowing with novice (but certainly well-meaning) translators flailing about in dangerous waters infested with their own conceptual blindness. What happens if a translator understands the languages, but not the ideas? How do those translations work out in the real world? Since we must understand those ideas to do this accurately, we must know not only what we know, but we must also know what they know, too. They translate ideas.Īnd in today’s commercial translation market, that means we translate the ideas of people who are deeply invested in some highly complicated activities and are willing to pay us to convey them. So translators do not translate languages or words. The words of language are just the symbols we manipulate to paint meaning into our world - to project pictures that convey the underlying message, concept or idea. ![]() This can’t be true, though, because language itself isn’t even about words. – where translators are looked upon with deep suspicion as these bizarre mythological creatures of ambiguous progeny whose field of endeavor is certainly trivial and should have been rendered mute by automated translation decades ago.Īt the core of this fallacy is the ancient and somewhat quaint notion that translation is just about language – about words. It’s not the fault of our polite party-goer asking the “how many languages” question, since it’s just an attempt to strike up a friendly conversation.Īnd there’s no help from our culture, either – especially in the U.S. So my response to this friendly question of “how many languages do you speak?” would be a bit playful and would always be delivered with a smile: In my case, for example, I’d arrive at such parties after having worked out certain issues in my translation work such as the principles underlying optical excitation of Rayleigh waves by interband light absorption or coherent acoustic resistance to an electron-hole plasma or approaches to calculating the electronic structure of alloys. It’s a question that suggests an innocent, almost whimsical notion of translation as a low-stress career of light reflection, picked up effortlessly while flipping through phrase books and sipping sweet tea in the afternoon shade. This prolonged effort is crucial to our ability to precisely convey all these concepts across language barriers.īut no matter how many fields we master as translators, awaiting us at that same cocktail party will be the eternal question that has been asked of translators since the Tower of Babel: This process involves learning highly complex concepts in science, technology, philosophy, law, finance, business, music and dozens of other fields through immersion in the lab, lecture hall, classroom, production line, fabrication plant, trading floor or boardroom. We translators can spend decades of rigorous effort in the lead-up to our translation careers – and certainly during such careers – developing the crucial subject-matter expertise essential to the translation enterprise. Mysticism and superstition in medicine have been duly and effectively discarded in the proverbial dustbin of history. In medicine, for example, those include a recognition that the human body exists in a physical universe subject to the laws of science and not to a fictitious universe of mysterious spirits accessible to the chosen, pre-ordained few, a concept that had dominated human medicine for millennia.Īs a result, medical doctors strolling through a cocktail party today would never encounter questions from their friends, patients or colleagues about the effectiveness of specific spells, incantations or charms in their medical practice. It’s the very essence of translation.īuried deep in the bedrock of every profession are certain truths that are universally understood and accepted by modern practitioners. ![]() It’s About What the Words are About.ĭecemSubject-matter knowledge is not just “important” to translation.
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