I have worked as a translator on and off since completing my masters in 1998. After an extended period during which my translation work was very part-time, in October 2019 I returned to full-time freelance translating work. For the most part my work involves being sent Word files in a foreign language which I 'overtype' (i.e. replace the foreign language text with my English translation). My languages are German, Italian, Russian and French. My areas of expertise include semi-technical legal texts (such as contracts or court rulings) and texts related to detergents (such as patents or reports), as well as all sorts of commercial texts, advertising anything from spas to interfaces for paid parking. One of my niche jobs is translating coding-relating texts for a major social media company.
As I reflect on my work (and try to improve how I do it), I thought it would be useful to break the process of translating down into the constituent activities it involves. Hopefully, this will elicit feedback and ideas from others.So, here are some of the tasks involved in translating:
Surveying. At the start of a translation project, often when bidding for a job or having accepted one, it is good to read through the text as much as possible, to get a feel for it, including any issues such as formatting, which may be time-consuming later.
Highlighting. Before moving on the next stage, it often saves time to read the following section of the text you are about to translate, highlighting issues, whether unknown terms or difficult-to-translate turns of phrase, with a view to researching and resolving these.
Ploughing. This involves working your way through a text, translating sentence-by-sentence. This requires the most energy and perseverance and takes up the most time, although I would say that 'ploughing' should not take up more than about 70% of the time, given the importance of other tasks. With deadlines always looming, ploughing requires momentum, with targets to be met each hour/day. At the same time, if done too quickly or superficially, ploughing can leave too many or too major issues to be resolved later, and, therefore represents a false economy of time.
Resolving. Issues which arise have to be resolved. Often you have to revisit issues resolved earlier, as better solutions come to light. So it is a good idea to have some mechanism for finding these when you need to come back to them. Time is of the essence, so there is rarely an opportunity to do extensive research, but it is invaluable if you can find comparable texts in English with the relevant terms and phrases. Ideally, these should be written directly in English, using idiomatic phraseology and standard choice of terminology. Consistency is often a challenge; one strategy is to record how you are translating key words repeated throughout the text. If necessary, these can all be changed at once, for example by performing a search throughout the text.
Kneading. A translated text needs to be 'kneaded' from sounding foreign and stilted to sounding idiomatic and appropriate to (in my case) an English-language reader. Often this takes several 'goes' and often the translator will revise their initial version, as they sense what sounds foreign and how it could be made to sound more English (naturally, the same principle applies when translating from and into other languages).
Gleaning. In agricultural terms this is about 'picking up the pieces'. In translation terms it refers to the painstaking process of checking, resolving outstanding issues and removing any minor mistakes and typos. Translation quality is measured in terms of the number of drafts. Each time you produce a draft and comb through it, you remove errors and add quality. Printing the text out on paper helps to catch faults which the eye skims over on-screen. One challenge is to find ways of approving segments of the text which have already been checked, so you can focus your attention on areas which still require checking. Some online platforms have a mechanism for this. Towards the end of the process, it is always good to spell-check, sometimes more than once.
Submitting. Eventually, the moment comes when you have to submit the translation. A methodical approach, especially in terms of checking, can make this entire process more mechanical and therefore predictable and objective, giving more of a sense of a job completed. And, once you have submitted the translation, the best thing to do is forget it and move on to the next thing.
Post-translation. Without contradicting the previous point above, having translated a text, sometimes laboriously, there are things which are worth recording for future reference. At the most basic level, terminology, however, also phraseology. In terms of the former, I recently discovered the term 'dependee' (that one which something or someone is dependent). In terms of the latter (phraseology) I found and was able to use the phrase "there is a linear correlation between A and B"; in the source text the phraseology, which to my ear didn't sound great in English, was, "A linearly depends on B". Find some way of recording these solutions - to be reused in future translations. Also, with the benefit of search engines, there is no need to retain hard copies of texts, but it is worthwhile keeping an electronic copy of the source text and target text, so that you can find them, if required.
This post is a work in progress and I am very interested to hear others' ideas and get their input. Please use the Facebook comments to do so!
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