infundibulum

An interesting post at “The Translator’s Blog“: The translation of text vs. the translation of meaning.

A colleague raised the issue of translation at the beginner stage, when you basically just “run” through the text word by word to polish the style afterwards, again and again until it works for you.

The experienced translator, in contrast, will extract the meaning of a text and start from there rather than “copy” the actual word into his target language.

I’ve been experiencing this distinction firsthand of late. I’ve been using a new, open source CAT(Computer Aided Translation) tool called “OmegaT”:http://www.omegat.org/omegat/omegat.html to do some translations of my own, from Portuguese (oi Jonas) and also from Welsh (hylo Nic). I definitely fall into the “polish the style afterwards” camp, although I’d have to say that “polish” may be too ambitious a word– my Portuguese is rusty, and my Welsh is… well, no comment. Give me a couple more years.

Translation is a strange game–in a weird way, I can imagine being a good translator of a language without being a terribly fluent speaker. Becoming fluent is a process of internalizing the language completely, to the point where you speak by intuition. Translation is more like being hyper aware of all the details of both languages at once: you have to know every possible rendering of a phrase in the target language, in order to reflect the original text as idiomatically as possible. That’s the impression I have had, in any case, in my limited attempts at translation.

(By the way, I’ve been caught up in another project, but that little phrase-splitting script I mentioned in the previous post will be coming up soon. I promise.)