Translation Woes: 6 challenges faced by every translator

Translation work might sound easy to you, but being a translator is much more than being bilingual. As a translator, you need to transcribe and interpret messages suitably as per your client’s needs.
In translation, you need to keep in mind about your target audience’s socio-cultural factors as well besides the language aspects. If you want to complete a translation, you need a very specific skill set to overcome language barriers.
It’s not easy to work as a translator in the translation industry. When your translation works, the audience will rarely even notice, it was there. However, if your translation fails, it will go against your goodwill and cause reputation damage to you & your business. You need to work hard to avoid such a situation.

Let’s take a look about 6 challenges faced by every translator while doing a translation.

1.      Attaining 100% Accuracy: 

As a translator, you will have a target of producing 100% accurate translation. You know that it will be next to impossible because any given sentence can be translated in numerous formats depending upon the translation itself & many other factors. Moreover, there will be errors like grammar mistakes, typos, mistranslations as well in files.

2.      Language Structure: 
Attaining 100% Accuracy:  The language structure of English is different when compared to that of other languages. To give an example, in French, the adjective comes after the noun, but in English, it comes before a noun. Sounds confusing? There are various other challenges you may face while translating. Language is vast, complex & ever-evolving. As a translator, you must know the exact structure of each language so that you can use them properly.

3.      Multiple meaning words: 

One of the major problems that translators face while doing translation is the words which have multiple meanings. For example, ‘Fish on our plate’ or ‘Fish in the sea' has the same thing: fish. There is a difference between expecting a thing to happen and hoping it will happen. This can be the case for translation as well.

4.      Context: 

Context is everything in translation. Your clients need to understand what you are intending to convey to them through the context. Such a situation can get difficult when they only get text files to work with. So whenever possible, try to deliver relevant context. You might as well need to work with your translators on this part slightly so that they understand where context is important.

5.      Maintaining Tone & Style: 

Tone & style is considered to be one of the most important factors in translation. As a translator when you are translating from one language to the other, it may not always be easy to maintain the tone & style. For example, you will never want to make an energetic marketing campaign to be translated into a dull language. Similarly, you will never want a user guide of medical equipment to use any informal language. Maintaining tone and style indeed is one of the challenges that you can face as a translator.

6.Compound Words: 

Dealing with compound words is difficult in translation. Compound words are defined to be those that are composed of two or more nouns and adjectives combined. Many compound words are straightforward and they reflect their meaning, however, others only mean half of them. Example of the earlier can be words like afternoon, seashore & the latter will be bellboy or bookworm. Worst is some words can have a different meaning altogether, like, butterfly. So dealing with compound words of a different language can be a challenge for you.

Translation work is in no way a piece of cake. It is about you being able to find out the right words which can depict the right meaning and message to your target audience.