Monday, March 22, 2010

Importance of Reputation for Freelance Translators

Your personal reputation is one of the most valuable things that we will own regardless of where we are of what we do. It is something that is with you always, affects parts of your daily life and is very difficult to change.

A good Freelance Translator provides good quality of work and they work to mutually agreed deadlines. The saying goes ‘a salesman is only as good as his last sale’. A similar saying could also be applied to translators. ‘A translator is only as good as their last translation’. In both circumstances there is the detail to consider.

A Freelance Translator generally seeks a situation where they have a regular client base who considers them first. Ideally, if they are too busy the client will still come to them first for the next project and the next project. Reputation for a freelancer allows them to earn better rates even though there will always be someone else offering to do the same job for less money. It allows the freelance translator to discuss the issues of a project openly with the client or Translation Project Manager and have them work with them to complete their service.

The reputation of a freelance translator can be most easily maintained by:

1.Staying within their capabilities: - It is not advisable to take on highly complicated specialised texts that you have no experience with unless you have discussed this with your client and have a clear plan how you will complete the project. Otherwise you might perform below what is reasonable.

2.Work to deadlines: - Ensure that you assess the deadline and only agree to what is achievable. If you are upfront and say when the translation can be achievable this may well turnout fine and avoid loss of your personal standards for quality.

3.Check your work: - It is advisable to take a short break and then review your translation before you send. You may have made some simple error or missed something that this last scan can pick up. This will also avoid you sending the wrong file. Checking you own work is not proofreading. Proofreading in my opinion involves a 2nd independent translator.

4.Problems: – If you have a problem or require extra time it is important to tell the client ASAP. This allows the issue to be addressed as soon as possible and a solution found. The problem might be legibility of part of the source text or you might be delayed due to a personal problem. If possible, the more warning notice the better for everybody.

Meaning of Translation

Translation is, above all, an activity that aims at conveying meaning or meanings of a given-linguistic discourse from one language to another, rather than the words or grammatical structures of the original. The meaning of a given word or set of words is best understood as the contribution that word or phrase can make to the meaning or function of the whole sentence or linguistic utterance where that word or phrase occurs. The meaning of a given word is governed not only by the external object or idea that particular word is supposed to refer to, but also by the use of that particular word or phrase in a particular way, in a particular context, and to a particular effect.

Translation requires a high standard of knowledge of a language and a meticulous approach to words and processing text. Many specialise in specific fields such as legal or medical texts. Translators also usually only translate into their native language. A translator would need a high degree of fluency to translate out of their native language, as no matter how long you’ve lived in a country, there will always be forms of the language you don’t know.

Use of Dictionary


As a language learner you should never be far from a good dictionary. Learn how to use it properly and you will enrich your language skills. Besides using your dictionary as a quick reference book for words you’re not sure about, use it as a source of increasing your knowledge of how your new language works. This doesn’t mean you need to read it from cover to cover. However you should understand how your bi-lingual dictionary works.

Familiarise yourself with the list of abbreviations usually found at the front of the dictionary. You should also find grammar tips, verb tables, cultural notes, pronunciation tips, numbers, weights and measures and times and dates. Knowing how to find these quickly can be very useful to the language learner.

In the middle of a good language dictionary there is often a section on common language phrases. This will be split into categories such as: job applications, commercial correspondence, opinions, likes and dislikes, the telephone and e-mail. Use this section to improve your language skills. Many people don’t even know it’s there!

Difficulties with translation


Despite having the support of a good dictionary, it’s always a good idea to try and ‘stretch’ your language skills. When you come across a word you don’t know don’t automatically turn to the dictionary. By all means use it as a back up to check words, but first of all try and get the meaning of the word.

Look at the whole context of the paragraph and see if it gives you any clues. Consider the tense of the word. It may be a familiar verb in a tense you don’t recognise. Try and take a step back and look at the meaning of the text you are trying to translate, to see if the unfamiliar words fall into place. This method doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s much more satisfying then turning the pages of a dictionary.

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Role and status of Translators and Interpreters

In the colonial context, we find translators and interpreters, but particularly interpreters taking on an amazing range of responsibilities which go far beyond linguistic mediation. Interpreters in the colonial context acted as guides, explorers, brokers, diplomats, ambassadors and advisers on Indian or local affairs; that is why they were sometimes branded as traitors, because they were indispensable to the colonial authorities. In other contexts, too, translators and interpreters, in oral traditions such as the African tradition were expected to act as spokesmen for their communities, not just as linguistic mediators. In the eighteenth century in Turkey, the duty of the Naval Dragoman included the supervision of the collection of taxes from non-Muslim subjects, though later on the 1839 Tanzimat limited his responsibility to interpreting again, i.e. strictly linguistic mediation.

In terms of status, the highest status attained by translators and interpreters seems to have been linked to the profession being hereditary, as in the case of the 'wise men' in the oral tradition of Africa, who passed on their skills to their sons. Other examples include the TSUJIIS in Japan, who exercised family monopolies on interpreting in this area from the seventeenth century until the end of Japan's isolation in the second half of the nineteenth century. There are also the Greek Phanariots in Turkey in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who similarly had sole control of the profession. All these groups were highly regarded by their communities and earned a very respectable living.

WORKING FRAMEWORKS


Another interesting area worth investigating concerns the use of Interpreters in contexts where we very rarely see them used today. The role of interpreters in educational contexts is of entry on the Hungarian tradition to bring it up to date, following the unfortunate death of Dr. Gyorgy Rado in 1994. Sara Laviosa-Braithwaite provided invaluable support as my Research Assistant for practically the whole of 1995. Juan Sager helped edit a number of entries in the summer of 1996, and Kirsten Malmkjaer stepped in later that summer to give the editing a final push.

Even with so much good will and generous assistance from a large number of people, there are bound to be some errors and infelicities, given the scope of the enterprise.

In the view of aforementioned description, the Translators as well as the interpreters are playing an important role in the society while they are called traitor. However, their role neither ignored nor be abolished from the society because of their role for the society. They are the indiscernible part of the society.For more Information Plz visit our Website here :- www.somyatrans.com

Subtitling: A Real Art...

When we talk about what subtitling is, we can say in simple words that it is a printed translation. Which surely is true, but what if we take it as an art. You’ll not agree with me on the first place. When given some deep thoughts to it, nobody can deny the importance and skills required to be a subtitler.

On a simple note subtitling is one of the several processes commonly used in the translation of audio-visual products. It can be in the form of captions or simple subtitles shown at the bottom on the screen.

Subtitling is much cheaper than dubbing, and it takes less time, so it is common in smaller countries for which the audience is too small to justify dubbing on a large scale.

Now lets discuss it further.

From a linguistic point of view, subtitling can be divided into two types: a) Intralingual subtitling, also known as captioning, which is primarily aimed at the deaf and hard of hearing, but also extremely useful for people learning a foreign language; b) Interlingual subtitling, the spoken/written message of the original product which is translated into the language of the target audience. From technical point of view it can again be of two type: a) Open Subtitling, which refers to subtitles that appear permanently on screen and cannot be ‘switched off’ by the viewer; b) Closed subtitles, which the viewer can choose to see or not.

Translation of Subtitling is sometimes very different from the translation of written text. Usually, when a film or a TV program is subtitled, the subtitler watches the picture and listens to the audio sentence by sentence. As subtitling doesn’t just mean to translate the dialogue, thus other meaningful language in films such as signs, letters, captions and other written words are also an important area needed to be considered upon. When a film has lots of written language and dialogue happening together, this can result in some very difficult choices for the subtitler.The subtitler may or may not have access to a written transcript of the dialog. Especially in commercial subtitles, the subtitler often interprets what is meant, rather than translating how it is said, i.e. meaning being more important than form. The subtitler does this when the dialog must be condensed in order to achieve an acceptable reading speed.

The subtitler’s task is already difficult because subtitles are so limited in space (about 37 characters per line, and a maximum of two lines) and time (subtitles should not stay on the screen longer than six seconds). The result is that the content of the dialogue has to be cut down to fit in the subtitles. Not only that, but the content has to be translated, and the subtitles also have to be ‘spotted’ or timed carefully to match the dialogue.

The basic aim of any Translation is to reformulate a source language message in a given target language, avoiding at all costs any misunderstandings in the process. In other translation practices mistakes can easily pass unnoticed, but this is rarely the case in a mode of translation as uniquely vulnerable as subtitling. Hence it will no be incorrect to project subtitling as another real art form of contemporary time.