Words or ideas?
Maria Virgínia B.
Multilingual Translator | Subtitler | Interpreter English, French, Spanish > European Portuguese | Member of SUBTLE — the Subtitlers’ Association
Kevin Hendzel, award-winning translator, linguist, author, media consultant, and translation expert, unravels this myth of the?translator, who is the?person who speaks languages?very clearly in?this blog post.
(…)?So translators do not translate languages or words. They translate ideas.
And in today’s commercial translation market, that means we translate the ideas of people who are deeply invested in some highly complicated activities and are willing to pay us to convey them.
Since we must understand those ideas to do this accurately, we must know not only what we know, but we must also know what they know, too. (…)
Do you agree? Please, let me know your opinion.
Professora Coordenadora at ISCAP
3 年That is an excellent question. In truth, I don't know how to answer that clearly because I believe that, unless you have worked in the field (and even then), it is impossible to know what is in a person's mind; what they are thinking; what they want to convey. This is true for any message... We decode according to our own knowledge and experience. We attempt to guess, given the multiple clues, and hope for the best :) Recently I created a logo based on a poster that had been created 3 years prior (by someone I don't know). It had a green background and the letters were orange... Without money and without time (it was for the next day), I grabbed my paints and drew a green line. The paintbrush was dry and the bristles were glued together. The green line came out wavy and inconsistent. I painted an orange circle. I was in a hurry and so I painted the orange over the green. I came out very interesting (and extremely cheap). The next day a young women I was talking to looked at the "logo" and said: "please congratulate the designer. The uncertainty in the green, in a journey of hope with a dusty sun, but a sun, nonetheless"... I guess this is why translation is complex.