Manual Translation Hints
Just to share my personal concept of manual translation in brief hints with you to try, specially with the natives of a particular target language.
- Your mother tongue is naturally the easiest target language to translate into, thats why natives preferred to localize a product.
- Your academic background (ideally in linguistics), overall general knowledge & some basic translation & writing skill/experience 'd be a plus point, so you can meet the needs, hence more the ability more the acuracy.
- Keep translation references & tools handy eg: physical/electronic references, translation memory/management tools practised in general. Also standby online references/tools often needed in special cases.
- Its important to know topic/title of the source contents if available, but also ok otherwise, as the next hint may assist you pick some good idea.
- Take an overview by reading the entire contents of the source matter for an idea of whats it all about & whats all about it.
- As you start, its good to keep previously read overview in mind. Go word by word to sentence wise by carefully studying/understanding each (current) in context of the overview/sense/syntax and evaluate choosing most appropriate/accurate equivalents (meanings) to meet (your) target language (ideally native) culture, customs, conventions, standards, linguistics & audience. Use available references & tools as needed. Review entire para or section to fine tune, as you finish. Continue same way with each para or section to complete.
- You may encounter situation where a particular item in source content may not be an exact case or no case at all in target language culture/customs/linguistics thus no alternative equivalents may be available/existed. There you may need it adapted by a seemless tiny explanation/expression within the relative course of length & meaning.
- After you finish translation, read source contents & translation again to correct & improve.
- Proof read entire work for typos & errors, before you publish.
- As for my particular case, I like to mention that unlike some skilled & experienced translators, I may be more references & tools reliant, that may help me get a broader scope & managed approach hence desired results.
- According to good translators, its good to be a writer to be a good translator. Well, I am not a writer to have this quality, but atleast to benefit from this guideline, just started with writing these lines here to become a writer soon, hence a good translator.
- Finally I like to express my views on what I like best about this field, though you may think it funny. For 100% accuracy, a translator has to utilize all efforts, references & tools to know as much about source contents as the content author. Suppose you have a computer programming book to translate. If you dare to go for 100% accuracy, you must have to become 100% aware of programming, no matter the issue is out of your work boundries hence time consuming. Closer is your work accuracy, better you get the programming concepts and thats the beauty of this field, that I like best.
