Improving your translating skills

Unless you are employed on a salary as an in-house translator or are doing it on a voluntary basis, chances are you’ll be working for yourself. Two thirds of freelancers are paid by the word. The more you can do in the hours you have, the more money you can earn. We asked for some time-saving tips from a sample of over 1,000 translators. Here’s what they said:

First draft

1.  Problematic phrases. Don’t spend too much time on words that defeat you. Translate provisionally or mark them in some way – use asterisks, question marks, highlighting or insert comments, so that you can look them up in batches. This is good practice psychologically and is more efficient; you get the bulk of the work done and isolate problems which can be dealt with all together later.

2.  Cross-referencing. The standard advice is to check all items in at least one bilingual dictionary and one monolingual/target language dictionary. These days doing a search on the internet gives you something few dictionaries can – instant context and pages of it. Translation websites are also useful when they contain their own glossaries - the trouble is there are very few of them.

3.  Start a glossary. This makes sense if you have repeated work in a particular field. A quarters of our translators said they didn’t bother, which suggests that they are doing a range of different texts from week to week. Of those that do keep glossaries, half use a simple spreadsheet or table. Keep it simple, would seem to be the message.

4.  Computer Assisted Translation? These tools can build up a glossary for you and automatically translate words and phrases that are repeated through a text, so speeding up your work, but you need time to learn how to use them and they are expensive. Here’s one opinion: ‘the main problem in translating is to guess what the author actually wanted to say and no machine does that for you.’

Revising the text

1.  Take a break. Leave a few hours between finishing the first rough text and proofreading. You’ll spot more mistakes that way. Half of all our translators said they did so. Typographical errors are what people usually find on a first proofread, rather than mistranslations.

2.  Does it stand up? When proofreading, do so without reference to the original. Does it make sense and sound natural in its own right?

3.  Obvious omissions. When checking the whole translation with the original, look for the missing words, phrases, sentences, even paragraphs!

4.  Meaning not form. You have to account for the function of every source word. You don’t necessarily have to translate it. This means you can be flexible about the order of words and phrases, and their form- use a verb rather than a noun, a gerund instead of an infinitive. Strange though it sounds, grammar is more flexible than vocabulary.  

In the next issue: we look at setting yourself up as a translator: the importance of specialising, limiting your language pairs and investing in the basic tools of the trade.