Not Lost on the Translator: The First Thread.

Now that we have received the document for translation from the client, what happens? How does the translator enter this leg of the journey?

You would think that we open the file and start translating at page 1, line 1 and go on.

Nope. At least, that's not how I do it.

A journey starts with a plan, a map, an analysis of information and context.

I always start a translation project by reviewing the document, its structure, its tone and style, its different parts and components.

The table of contents, the list of acronyms, the index of tables and figures, this is the terminology vault. Titles, captions, abbreviations hold the key to the specific vocabulary, key stakeholders, concepts you will be coming across in the document.

It's not about reading the document yet. It's about surveying it and building a mental atlas. This approach helps me discover the document's fabric and identify the different parts.

Scan, extract, research, translate, document, find and replace.

This serves two purposes.

• It allows you to immerse yourself immediately in the document, mapping its content, its outline, where it starts and where it ends and how it gets there. This is crucial for a translator to be able to "understand" the document instead of translating words.

This gives a sense of meaning and purpose. It's the thread that puts the translator on track for the whole job.

• Doing the terminology groundwork from the start, by building a glossary and applying it all over in one go, certainly saves time. But, most importantly, it provides consistency and coherence. Let's face it, you could run into a word or expression on page 3 of the document and translate. Then find it again on page 67 and translate it in a completely different way. Both could be right, but this introduces discrepancy and alters the quality of the document. 

This is exactly the principle behind CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tools. Without the touch of human intelligence and context-related strategy.

Now that the structural map and terminology vault are set, we are ready to stitch our piece together.

The next step is capturing the voice of the author(s) and replicating it in the target language, with the right choice of words and style. But more on this in the next post.

This, in my opinion, is how a translation thread begins: not with a dictionary, but with a pattern and a guide to assemble the translation.