| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Working from more than one language Thread poster: Christopher Schröder
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Kay Denney 
France
Local time: 15:00
French to English
Ah now this is interesting. I speak five languages but only have one source and one target for work. I feel that I couldn't possibly translate as well as I do without living and breathing my source language.
At the translation school where I got my master's, people with two or more source languages only had to get 10/20 to pass, and those of us with only one source language had to get 12/20 to pass. I understood that nobody would bother to have more than one source language if the ... See more Ah now this is interesting. I speak five languages but only have one source and one target for work. I feel that I couldn't possibly translate as well as I do without living and breathing my source language.
At the translation school where I got my master's, people with two or more source languages only had to get 10/20 to pass, and those of us with only one source language had to get 12/20 to pass. I understood that nobody would bother to have more than one source language if the requirements were the same however many source languages you had. To be hired at the UN or EU, you need at least two source languages and the school was very proud of the numbers of students who went on to work at either the UN or the EU. They obviously wanted to encourage students to have at least two source languages to make sure that enough students could get hired there.
Which is all very well, but a PM who needs a translator just wants someone who can produce a decent translation. The diploma is a guarantee that the translator knows their stuff. And yet the translator who only has one source language was required to translate to a higher standard. Imagine that you hire a translator and they do a poor job, only worth a mark of 10/20. Are you not allowed to protest that they did a poor job simply because they could do a similarly poor job translating the same thing but from a different language? ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 15:00
French to English
Metin Demirel wrote:
I translate mainly from Italian to Turkish, yet I also receive a lot of English to Turkish projects from the Italian agencies I work with. I believe they can find other translators for their ENG>TUR projects instead of assigning projects of both language pairs to me. And again, I believe that would be more budget-friendly for them. But maybe they seem to lean towards maintaining a stronger collaboration with a single service provider, rather than dividing efforts across multiple providers.
Yes, when I was working as a PM, I handled everything that had to be translated into English. The main bulk of work was FR-EN but sometimes we'd get something in another source language. When that happened, I would look in our database. If I saw a translator with the right language pair who I regularly sent FR-EN work, I would send them the job, because I already knew I could trust the quality of their work.
| | | | | Diplomas and guarantees | Jul 11, 2023 |
Kay Denney wrote:
The diploma is a guarantee that the translator knows their stuff.
Real-life experiences tell another story. I have seen terribly incompetent work from translators, lawyers and accountants, all with diplomas.
I don't intend to generalise, of course, but a diploma in itself is not enough to guarantee anything.
I have the impression that a certain type of person stops making any efforts as soon as they have a diploma, as if a diploma cancelled all necessity to develop and improve skills.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:00
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
| Not sure I agree | Jul 11, 2023 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
If you cast your net wide (i.e. offer more language combinations or work in more fields), you'll get more jobs to choose from, so you are better able to choose jobs that pay better. If you get jobs from only a small group of clients, you have less of a choice.
I suspect that, ceteris paribus, the kind of clients that offer jobs that "pay better" will tend to focus on freelancers who are specialised in both a single language AND a certain domain.
My reasoning is that unless there are shortages of talent in a pair, clients will use the heuristic of "more time spent in one pair = more experience = better". If clients find that a freelancer who translates from JP to EN is not that great, I don't think they move on to a different translator who spends half their time on JP and half on DE. I think they grit their teeth look for another JP to EN specialist.
I accept that there might be exceptions. For example, if they have worked from French to English with Ms Jones for fashion texts and have found that she is reliable and does a great job, they might well want to give her a go for her other pair, which is Italian to English.
I haven't seen any evidence in my niche that my clients deal with freelancers translating from multiple languages to English. I do know people that deal with languages other than JP, but anecdotally that mostly seems to be because they lack flows in JP i.e. they are struggling to compete in that pair. (I know one person who has great industry experience and they do JP and another language, so maybe their situation is akin to that of Ms Jones above.)
Like Kay, I have quite enough on my hands trying to stay current with my main language (Japanese in my case). Maybe linguists more gifted than myself, and I'm sure there are many, can hold multiple languages in their head at the required high level.
Regards,
Dan
[Edited at 2023-07-11 15:03 GMT]
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| Some observations | Jul 13, 2023 |
Chris is cheating because although Danish, Norwegian and Swedish evolved from the same language, they are still full of false friends, traps and the like. There can be Danish expressions that have the opposite or a completely different meaning in Norwegian or Swedish. The same can be said about certain English expressions in the many variants, but it's still the same basic grammar and syntax. Not so with the Scandinavian languages.
I have no problem keeping my three working language... See more Chris is cheating because although Danish, Norwegian and Swedish evolved from the same language, they are still full of false friends, traps and the like. There can be Danish expressions that have the opposite or a completely different meaning in Norwegian or Swedish. The same can be said about certain English expressions in the many variants, but it's still the same basic grammar and syntax. Not so with the Scandinavian languages.
I have no problem keeping my three working languages apart or understanding the source meaning, but I have lived and worked in countries where they are spoken and with natives. That's an experience no formal training can provide. On the other hand, I find certain Norwegian and Swedish expressions a lot more difficult to understand since I don’t have much experience with these languages, so I carefully consider the source before accepting (in the rare case than an existing client asks if I could handle one of these languages).
Learning a new language just to translate from it would be a costly and difficult exercise taking many years, if not decades. I don’t think I would recommend it. I just stick to what I knew and know already.
Some translators are struggling to keep just their only two working languages apart, which becomes obvious when we revise their output. Human capability is incredibly varied, so it seems absurd to try to formulate common guidelines. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 15:00
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Ice Scream wrote:
That makes sense, yes, but the benefits of specialising in a field aren't necessarily transferable between source languages.
Sure, I did not mean to imply that you can add a language and then all your specialized knowledge simply duplicates itself into that new language. Some knowledge will transfer, obviously, but a lot of knowledge in a specialism is language-specific.
| | | | Tony Keily
Local time: 15:00
Italian to English
+ ...
| I agree with some of what you say, but... | Jul 14, 2023 |
Having lived and worked for over a decade in each of three different EU countries, I feel pretty much at home translating from Italian, Spanish and Catalan.
I don't look for work from French or German to English, but my IT/ES/CAT customers sometimes come knocking for those combinations and I'll generally take what they have to offer.
I do agree with your point on legal systems, though, and that can be a limiting factor.
| | | | | They're simply incompetent | Jul 15, 2023 |
Thomas T. Frost wrote: Kay Denney wrote:
The diploma is a guarantee that the translator knows their stuff.
Real-life experiences tell another story. I have seen terribly incompetent work from translators, lawyers and accountants, all with diplomas. I don't intend to generalise, of course, but a diploma in itself is not enough to guarantee anything. I have the impression that a certain type of person stops making any efforts as soon as they have a diploma, as if a diploma cancelled all necessity to develop and improve skills.
I know that there are incompetent translators, and as you wrote above, this is not only about translation. I know incompetent lawyers, medical doctors, accountants, even people of cloth. These people know how to pass a test to attain certain diplomas and certificates, but they are not the best or at least good in what they do. I don't think it's not that they don't make any efforts but they are not simply good at that subject. They may have the knowledge, yes, but they can't apply that knowledge in actual work.
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