Training for Translation

            We may have mentioned before that our Dad owns a translation business. He has customers from all around the world and translates legal documents, user manuals for appliances, codes of conduct for other businesses and also articles for magazines. Because my sister and I know both Turkish and English, we have recently begun to translate some articles for him. We are still learning but I got my first one published last month. It was an article that went into an airlines magazine.

            Maybe some of you have wondered what it is like to translate. Well, it isn't easy at all, even if you know the language extremely well and have a dictionary. There is one translation rule that every translator should know: When translating, a person should always translate into their mother tongue because they will know best how to write their own language smoothly. For me, this is English so I always translate documents from Turkish, into English. Sometimes a sentence may sound okay in one language but it doesn’t make sense to the reader in another language so you have to be a little creative but remain accurate.  That is difficult.

            Another problem is idioms. Many Turkish idioms do not make sense in English and, therefore must be changed to sound right, but this is extremely difficult.

Translators also have to do a lot of research if a technical word or name is not in their dictionaries. That is tedious work and I don’t enjoy that part.

            Something else I have learned while translating for magazines is that you can't believe everything that you read. Sometimes magazines make claims about historical instances etc. because it will make their article more interesting. You know it is not true but you are just hired to translate, not correct the inaccuracies.  That is sometimes frustrating for me.

            I enjoy translating and hope to get better at it as I practice.

Frodo