Socrates translates Etruscan to Greek, Socrates translates Etruscan to Latin, therefore…
Dear translators:
I have a question for you. It’s my understanding that translators generally describe their language skills in one of two ways:
- A language which you can translate into or out of
- A language which you can translate out of
I’m using plain language because I find that the terminology used in the translation community can be a bit confusing. (Cases in point: the term “working language” seems to sometimes refer to either one of these two. The term “native language” usually implies that the translator can translate into or out of the language. Both of these terms seem to have exceptions.)
And another question:
I saw a CV of a translator who described their language skills as follows:
- English → French
- English → Portuguese
- French → Portuguese
What I don’t understand is, why wouldn’t one also list Portuguese to French? Isn’t it fair to assume that if a translator can transate into some French from English, that it’s safe to assume that they can also translate into French from any other language they know well (Portuguese, in this case)?
5 comments.
Technorati tags: translation
Yes, that CV seems to have an inconsistency in it. It suggests that the translator is a native or near-native speaker of both French and Portuguese and as such should be able to translate into them from any other language he/she understands - including from Portuguese to French. Maybe it’s just a typo and the third arrow was meant to point in both directions?
I used to be a translator myself (not any more, I have a real job now and translate only for fun :-) and as far as I understand, the convention is that every translator has certain source languages that he/she can understand but isn’t confident enough to produce text in them, and certain target languages that he/she is fully confident in and translates into them. Typically there is just one target language, the one he/she is a native speaker of. Translation agencies tend to get suspicious of people who list non-native languages as target.
But it also has to be said that not everybody buys the source/target distinction. It’s more of a question of degree and register. I know of people who are not native English speakers and wouldn’t think of translating, say, a novel into English, but are perfectly good at translating texts of a less imaginative nature, like technical manuals, and the result is indistinguishable from text produced by native speakers.
Assuming that the translator in question is a native of both Portuguese and French, maybe he(she) just doesn’t want to work with the Portuguese-French combination - but even so I honestly can’t understand why :-)
Thanks for the quick responses, guys!
Gotta love the internet ☺
I was trained as a translator and worked in Xerox’s translation group for 13 years. I’d be very reluctant to ask someone to translate important information into more than one language, ie. more than their mother tongue. They would have to prove to me that they had exceptional language skills, and were in constant touch with the cultures in which both languages are spoken, since cultural changes affect translation too. My guess is also that the person you mention is a bilingual speaker of French and Portuguese, but who also has a good but not mother-tongue understanding of English.
My Etruscan is a little rusty, but English, French and Portuguese should be easy.