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How to Overcome Challenges involved in Translation

How to Overcome Challenges involved in Translation

By: Kevin

8 Apr 2020

Being a translator means something more than only being bilingual, it involves being able to accurately translate and transcribe a message according to its intent and target market, taking into consideration not just linguistic issues but also social and cultural considerations as well. To complete a translation successfully and accurately, a very unique collection of competencies is needed to resolve language barriers. In reality, working in the translation industry as a specialist is not as easy as it may sound; let's look at the everyday translation difficulties confronting translators and linguists.

There are currently about 7000 spoken languages mentioned in the world, not to mention the number of dialects that occur in those languages. Every language is distinctive, with its history, roots, and structure. In a sense, and language is a mirror that has its complicated way of working idioms, phrases, composite terms, false mates, even onomatopoeic phrases; these render a language-rich and special, but also a barrier to communication.

Every job of translation is unique. Each business has its characteristics, expectations and little guidelines to watch for; each customer and language has certain little variations that make things simpler or tougher to work with than the last one. Essentially, no matter who you are and what consumers you deal for, each day of your professional life you can encounter special, different obstacles. Yet here we look at a few that might not be so special and unique; the sort of stuff that everyone in every translation field would have come across throughout their career at some stage. We're investigating issues that any translation service providers should have encountered at any stage.

Every one of the languages sits inside a given framework, with its own negotiated laws. The sophistication and singularity of this system are strongly associated with translation difficulty. E.g., a humorous joke in one language may lose its entire context when interpreted into another language, and if you're attempting to transcribe a joke into a foreign language, your interlocutor might not understand a sense of humor. This can be extremely risky, particularly inside the company and marketing environments. Such variations also confuse, because when used in particular sense terms, phrases or sentences may have other definitions, which may contribute to misunderstandings and misinterpretations: translation service providers need to be very vigilant about that.

Every community has a way to connect and transmit their thoughts, as well as their code about words, symbols, interpretation, shorthand, etc. Such variables create a tremendous opportunity for misunderstanding; hence, cultural differences are another significant obstacle confronted every day by translators. This often needs to be recognized by translators. Yes, a translator's function would not be successful if not properly interpreted. Therefore, dialectal languages are a significant challenge that skilled translators must contend with and resolve to correctly communicate the intended meaning, needing substantial expertise and skills in interpretation. It requires a specialized degree of linguistic expertise to get really difficult words, phrases, terminology, slang, and different dialects.

Not all of it translates. This may be a frightening proposition for someone trying to get documents converted into a target language, but that is the straight-up reality. Although certain issues certain languages should have terms and phrases, some other words and phrases are either completely specific or absent from the target languages. This poses a host of issues for translators, who try to find a solution for the German term that doesn't have an English counterpart. It does not render translation difficult, but it definitely makes translation services as a daunting task and thus shows the need for anyone to be a highly qualified and experienced individual working on any documents.

English and Japanese are perhaps two of the most nuanced languages on the globe, and while they come from very opposite ends of the continuum in terms of grammar, spoken language and geography, they both suffer from one very common issue which can trigger serious nightmare for any translator anywhere in the world. Words may also have a double sense in both of those languages. In English, for example, scales can indicate either a portion of a fish or a kitchen utensil, while in Japan writing the kanji isn't enough, since items can be written one way and pronounced another.

Translators who are expected to interpret certain materials such as literature will transcribe an entire plot, context, world, and environment into a foreign language. It requires ingenuity in the transition and modification of cultural principles and practices without changing them: the translator will stay faithful to the original object. For books, literary translations are about expressing thoughts, impulses and transcribing metaphors in a modified and realistic way to allow the novel to fly. This is also challenging to hold the written style unchanged and is another difficulty for translators to overcome. The same goes for poetry: to retain the underlying meaning, the tone of writing and the elegance of the work should be treated carefully.

Thus you can see, it requires more than simply being fluent to be eligible for skilled translations and working with translation companies who partner with qualified native translators. This is about choosing the best phrases to convey the correct meaning in another tongue. The consistency of the work of a translator includes correctly and appropriately interpreting and localizing messages and records and is a genuinely comprehensive and complex task.