First Steps of a Translator

How should our young colleagues educate themselves in the field of translatorship/interpreting?

The job of a translator is a very difficult profession which requires a multi-faceted accumulation of knowledge. As perceived by the public, our job does not just consist of translating and forgetting about the project.  Another prejudice is that you gain expertise in certain areas after a while, and the illusion that everything will be easier by that. Translation is not an effortless business. This fact won't change whether it is your first year or your 40. year in the business. It is one of the professions where intellectual accumulation is severely important. Our job is providing the continuity of communication in the world. It is to eliminate all the factors which may create lack of communication between the two languages and bring people together. 

First of all, the employer or owner, giving you the project for translation, desires a flawless work. The customer is not asking for much, actually... This is because many companies around the world connect and do business with agencies in different parts of the world through translators. The smallest mistake which the translator may make, can destroy all connections before its establishment. In this aspect, the work of translators is extremely critical.

While the concept that we pronounce as scientific and informational development took place pretty slowly in the last 300 to 400 years, there is hardly a day on which there is no development in today's world. There are numerous developments in almost every field and these are needed to be followed. To give an example; a cardiologist only follows a learning process and developmental process that is relevant to cardiology. However, since the translator can acquire specialization in various fields, he/she has to keep up with and study these fields according to a specific plan. You have to provide the follow-up of the fields in which you perform translation. No one on the market provides training or conferences which are specifically for translators.

You can gain the competence to translate in more than one expertise fields in the translation sector. However, because there are too many fields of expertise, it may have a negative influence on your learning process. Let's explain the subject by example; let's say you are a technical translator. During the year, there are lots of advancements in this field . In case you do not keep up with the innovations in this field of translation, which requires a huge deal of information, your translations may remain incomplete. This may result in a negative effect on the translation company which employed you.

Apart from conducting research in our field, an intellectual accumulation is also significant. Just doing research on our own field of study gets us in a vicious circle. In some cases, translations need multifaceted knowledge. In particular, literary works require an accumulation of knowledge in this direction. For example, Let's suppose that you translate a literary work in the field of crime. In these novels, besides the police, there are many technical elements and words. At this point, it is quite significant to search for words which you do not know. Saying "Technical word is not my field" would be an offense against translation.

Not just thinking literary, in order to be able to think scientificly, is the place which your intellectual level comes into play. The more you have improved yourself, the better quality your translations will be.  Loving research is one of the principal elements of translatorship.

Reading habits also have a great impact on translatorship. A candidate or translator must absolutely have the habit of reading. You must not only do reading about your own field. More knowledge improves you and makes you the one indispensible. Besides, you can have the chance to think about your translations outside the box, from a broad perspective.

Unfortunately, just knowing the language is not enough. Besides, our job is not to do word by word translation. If it was so, instead of us, the humans, the machnies would do this business. We work to maintain intercultural communication. The first step is knowing the language. The second step is to absorb the culture of both languages. So, why do we need to absorb? If we do not pay attention to cultural differences while translating text from the source language into the target language, our translation is both incomplete and may lead to cultural misunderstandings in the target language. While a word which is spoken in the source language does not sound rude and wrong, it may be a rough and incorrect phrase or word when you translate directly in the target language. From this point of view, we must pay attention to the cultural stage while doing translation.

Having good command of both languages means to internalize all fields. We wrote the cultural field above, apart from this, you must also educate yourself on grammar. You must adopt the rules of both your own language and the language in which you perform translation. First of all, you must learn the rules of your own language. If you don't know them, it will bring you nothing to know the rules of the other language. In addition to this, if you do not have good command of the rules of your language, it is quite difficult to learn the rules of a foreign language.

Academic education is a significant process all the time. Time to time, people who have lived abroad for a certain period of time and express their ability to translate, apply for job to translation agencies. But speaking a language and translating that is not the same thing. It does not matter whether it is oral or written, academic translation is the primary requirement for translation. The subtleties, rules of a language is able to only be mastered within an educational institution. For this reason, academic education is very significant.

Finding a job at the end of your education is a challenging process. In order to get rid of this stage fast and get into the business as immediate as possible, while you are at school, you must do an internship and perceive this business seriously. If you engage in an activity that will develop and gain expertise in your spare time outside your school's compulsory internship, you will not have difficulty finding a job when you graduate from your school. Because a translation agency, while recruiting translators, gives priority to the works and expertise.

İvogsan International Language Services Provider is the school where translators take the first step into the sector. In this respect, we allow our new friends who recently participated in the sector, to see in which field they can be more successful in the future by guiding them. We do not only perform translation, we also make great effort to bring new translators into the sector.