Prehistoric Perfectionism

With the upsurge of blogging and social media, the way we write has changed, and although it's something I've discussed in previous articles, I think viral blogger Tim Denning sums it up best:

Prehistoric messages were about saying something using the biggest words possible to inflate your ego and make yourself sound smarter and superior to everyone else. These models of the world are dead. Simple, authentic, beautiful, aggressive, raw, and uncensored is the new way.

So how should this reality affect our approach to translation?

Put simply ...

• We need to ditch the thesauruses.
• We need to dump the dictionaries.
• We need to discard the resources.

Warning: If you come across a term in the source text that you don't know, you will, of course, still need to look it up!

Instead, we have to force ourselves to just process the source text quickly and then swiftly render it in the target language without overthinking it. We just need to imagine we're talking to someone and explaining what the foreign-language text is saying. If we do that we're set, because paradoxically, translating faster actually produces better results, a notion I've dealt with in a previous article.

If you want a quote from yours truly, here's one for you:

If you're looking for just the right word, then it ain't the right word!

Yet many of us are still following the prehistoric approach, and I don't even think "prehistoric" is an exaggeration, as a lot of us are going into our translations as though we're trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls.

We view translation as hard, but the reality is WE'RE MAKING IT HARD.

Not only are we working less productively than we could be, we're also producing worse quality than we could be!

We're screwing ourselves over twice.

Of course, the faster-is-better approach only works if we're actually capable of producing the kind of "simple, authentic, beautiful, aggressive, raw, and uncensored" language that Tim talks about on the fly.

And that's a skill.

And like any skill, it needs to be developed.

What we need to do is take the time we've freed up from purging ourselves of our over-reliance on resources like thesauruses and dictionaries and use it to read more material in the language into which we translate.

We need to read, read, and read some more.

In our specialist field and general stuff, too.

After a while, we'll become so familiar with how people actually write in this post-prehistoric era that we'll be able to do it ourselves without thinking.

They'll be no need for post-translation rewriting and polishing.

We'll have it done in one go.

"First draft" will become an archaism. (In fact, it's already going that way.)

And that's when we'll be able to really start to shine as freelance translators.

For more tips on succeeding in freelance translation, check out my ebook on Amazon. It's called 88 WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR.

Best of luck on your journey.

Matt