Training to Become a Professional Translator

It is important to know the reasons you intend to become a certified translation professional. Is it for the money? Is it for the fame? Are you just interested in a part-time job or is it a hobby of yours? In order to become a good translator you will need to have the knowledge of your intentions in order to becoming a good one. You have to believe in them as the base of your entire Professional Translator career, that way you can develop your own rules, strategies and tools that will also determine your exclusive way of translating in a professional manner. It is necessary to identify your clients and work, each and every single one of them has different ways of visualizing their final work results. Your intention as a Professional Translator is to translate your client’s expectations with integrity and discipline to make your work worthwhile. The ideal Professional Translator should also find pleasure while working with translation. Despite the fact that you could spend hours, or even weeks working on the same piece of work, motivation is crucial. If you enjoy what you do, then certainly your work will demonstrate that to your readers and clients.

While it is essential to produce fast translations for your clients, you must not compromise on the integrity of your documents. In summary, to become a good translator, you will need to have good intentions in order to become a great one. You also need to believe in your work and potentials, listen careful to your clients and understand their needs, and enjoy every moment of your translating work process.

How much to charge for a translation project?

Knowing how much to charge can help you grow your client list or improve the profitability of your freelance translation business. When starting a career as a translator the rates can vary from $0.01 per word to $0.30 per word. Here are some things you should consider before setting up your rates:

·       Language – some languages are particularly in demand by employers at different times. But If you want to work with a language that has a large number of speakers and which is spoken in many countries, the ones to choose in order of 'usefulness' are: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, And Chinese (Mandarin), German, Japanese, Portuguese and Hindi/Urdu.

·       Deadline – how soon the job needs to be completed, text length and how flexible your schedule is to make sure you will deliver the job on time.

·       Skills – are you handling a specific job for the first time? Are you familiar with the subject to be translated?

·       Localization – Prices may vary from place to place, find out about the rates that are being charged within your city/country.

What is a translator designation?

Translator Designation Program .translator designation is typically a certificate or certification program which confirms experience and or knowledge of translator professionals. When you walk into a doctor's office or law firm you see their certifications and diplomas on their wall

because everyone wants to be assured that they have taken the time to study and become certified as holding a high level of specialized knowledge within their area of work, earning a translator designation is similar to this, employers want to know they are hiring someone who is a specialist, not a generalist. Who completes translator designation programs? Translator designation programs are completed by professionals around the world as developing markets mature and economies turn from mostly manufacturing based jobs to knowledge worker type jobs the demand for translator experts greatly increases. Some professionals who we know have completed translator designations in the past include:

Translation Fidelity vs. Transparency

Fidelity (or faithfulness) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French critic coined the phrase les belles infidèles to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time. Fidelity pertains to the extent to which a translation accurately renders the meaning of the source text, without adding to or subtracting from it, without intensifying or weakening any part of the meaning, and otherwise without distorting it. Transparency pertains to the extent to which a translation appears to a native speaker of the target language to have originally been written in that language, and conforms to the language's grammatical, syntactic and idiomatic conventions. A translation that meets the first criterion is said to be a "faithful translation"; a translation that meets the second criterion, an "idiomatic translation". The two qualities are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 49 | P a g e Global Translation Institute (GTI)

The criteria used to judge the faithfulness of a translation vary according to the subject, the precision of the original contents, the type, function and use of the text, its literary qualities, its social or historical context, and so forth. The criteria for judging the transparency of a translation appear more straightforward: an unidiomatic translation "sounds wrong", and in the extreme case of word-for-word translations generated by many machine-translation systems, often results in patent nonsense with only a humorous value (see Round-trip translation). Nevertheless, in certain contexts a translator may consciously strive to produce a literal translation. Literary translators and translators of religious or historic texts often adhere as closely as possible to the source text. In doing so, they often deliberately stretch the boundaries of the target language to produce an unidiomatic text. Similarly, a literary translator may wish to adopt words or expressions from the source language in order to provide "local color" in the translation. In recent decades, prominent advocates of such "non-transparent" translation have included the French scholar Antoine Berman, who identified twelve deforming tendencies inherent in most prose translations,[13] and the American theorist Lawrence Venuti, who has called upon translators to apply "foreignizing" translation strategies instead of domesticating ones. Many non-transparent-translation theories draw on concepts from German Romanticism, the most obvious influence on latter-day theories of "foreignization" being the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. In his seminal lecture "On the Different Methods of Translation" (1813) he distinguished between translation methods that move "the writer toward [the reader]", i.e., transparency, and those that move the "reader toward [the author]", i.e., an extreme fidelity to the foreignness of the source text. Schleiermacher clearly favored the latter approach. His preference was motivated, however, not so much by a desire to embrace the foreign, as by a nationalist desire to oppose France's cultural domination and to promote German literature. For the most part, current Western practices in translation are dominated by the concepts of "fidelity" and "transparency". This has not always been the case. There have been periods, especially in pre-Classical Rome and in the 18th century, when many translators stepped beyond the bounds of translation proper into the realm of ''adaptation''. Adapted translation retains currency in some non-Western traditions. Thus the Indian epic, the Ramayana, appears in many versions in the various Indian languages, and the stories are 50 | P a g e Global Translation Institute (GTI)

different in each. Anyone considering the words used for translating into the Indian languages, whether those be Aryan or Dravidian languages, will be struck by the freedom that is granted to the translators. This may relate to devotion to prophetic passages that strike a deep religious chord, or to a vocation to instruct unbelievers. Similar examples are to be found in medieval Christian literature, which adjusted the text to the customs and values of the audience.