Hi, everyone, I’m Ivo and I’ve been in the translation business for over two decades. Translation is a line of work which values adherence to professional standards, but also requires a hefty dose of creative thinking to get the job truly well done. It is a very basic lesson that translating “word-for-word” will produce incomplete translation, to the extent that there’s a phrase in Croatian, “u duhu jezika”, or “in the spirit of the language”, commonly used when talking about translation. It is evoked to clarify that proper translation takes into consideration context and intent, and should reflect both in the target language - essentially, that it is crucial to render the translated text “native”, so it doesn’t feel off to the intended audience.
In my experience, the ability to do this is based on two separate skills. The first is the intuitive command of the language, such as native speakers usually already have over their native language - and the reason why native speakers are most sought after as translators into their native language as the target language. Even so, it’s not impossible for second language speakers to achieve this level of intuition, especially if they’re fully immersed in the use of the language.
The second skill, and the one I want to discuss in this article, is the learned awareness of the specificities of a language - the subtle ways in which a language differs in expression from other languages. To a translator, this skill is not only important, but also perhaps harder to maintain in some ways than for non translators. This is due to the fact that any bilingual person will naturally borrow certain meanings or syntactic forms from one language into another, and mix and match meanings and forms in their informal speech. This may often result in a sort of a leak of these bilingual intuitions into our work as translators, where we could easily mistake our own idiomatic definitions or syntax for the one required in the target language.
Let me cut the theory short and use some examples to demonstrate what I’m aiming at. I’ll start with a commonly known type of mistake - the so-called “false friends” or “false cognates”. These are pairs of words which seem and sound very similar, but have different meanings:
Eventually - eventualno
The English word here denotes the meaning of “will happen at some point in the future”, and the Croatian meaning differs slightly, but crucially - “might happen at some point in the future”. To make it more complicated, the two are etymological cognates, and bear not only similar forms, but forms analogous to other such pairs which are not false friends, for example:
Gradually - gradualno
Therefore, making it easy to make a mistake if relying solely on your linguistic intuition.
Another error we might make is forgetting that the target language expresses some meanings in a completely different form, because the literal translation sounds passable enough not to trigger any warning from our intuition. For example:
She should’ve taken that into consideration when she took the job. - Trebala je to imati
na umu kad je uzela taj posao.
Croatian allows us to express “take the job” with a single verb, “zaposliti se”, which would make the translation sound far more natural. But the error here doesn’t change the overall meaning, and thus might be easy to overlook.
My final example is the error of copying the syntactic structure from the source to the target language. For example:
Adds estimated steps taken while in sleep mode - Dodaje procijenjene korake poduzete tijekom načina rada u mirovanju
Here, the entire word order from English is taken as-is and translated word for word into Croatian. The result isn’t at all incomprehensible or even very incorrect in meaning, but will require an additional second or two of parsing before the reader realizes what it means, especially without the source. Therefore I’d say it’s a mistake that could easily happen in a rush, but also obvious on a reread.
How can we avoid these mistakes? My advice is - always be your own critic. No matter how much experience you have, make a habit of checking or even double-checking your translation, and don’t avoid occasionally looking up the meanings of some very common words or phrases, even ones you might think you’ve mastered long ago.
I hope these examples clarify why I think a translator should never stop learning or relearning language. Being bilingual (or multilingual) can present its own challenges in translation work, and getting too reliant on our intuition might lead us into making mistakes. If you have any examples of your own of errors and challenges of this kind, please share them with me, I’m looking forward to the conversation.
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