Translation and Interpretation Words, words, and words again




Greater than 1 minutes

Translation and interpretation are two philological disciplines closely related. They same people scarcely perform these two tasks. The distinction in the ability, education, and even speech perception are so firm that few people can do both effectively on a professional level.

On the surface, the diversity between interpreting and translation is only the variety in the medium: The interpreter translates verbally while a translator defines written text. Both interpreting and translation presume an undoubted love of language and a deep cognizance of more than one language.

The variance in skills is debatably more than their similarities.The translator can comprehend the source language and the culture of the region where the text originated. Using a good library of dictionaries and reference materials, he succeeds to deliver that material clearly and accurately into the target language. In other words, while linguistic and cultural skills still are critical, an essential proof of a good translator is the capacity to write well in the target language.

Even bilingual individuals can hardly utter themselves in a given subject evenly well in both languages, and many excellent translators are not perfectly bilingual. Knowing this restriction, a good translator will only translate documents into his or her mother tongue. At Language, Scientific require their technical translators only to translate into their native language, in addition to their subject matter expertise.

An interpreter must be efficient to convert in both directions on the site, without using dictionaries or other supplemental reference materials. The interpreter must have extraordinary hearing abilities, especially for contemporaneous interpreting. Simultaneous interpreters need to progress and memorize the words that the source-language speaker is saying now while simultaneously outputting in the target language the explanation of words the speaker said 5-10 seconds ago. Interpreters must also possess superior public speaking skills and the mental efficiency to translate instantly idioms, colloquialisms, and other culturally-specific references into similar statements the target audience will comprehend.

Carl Tengstrom

About Carl Tengstrom

Born in Turku, Finland. Native language is Swedish. Retired. Working as a freelance translator. Source languages: Swedish, Finnish, English and German.

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