Hi~ I'm Katherine Cheng and I am on my last quarter for my degree in English with Emphasis on Translation. I decided to study this career after I finished watching a Chinese drama named "翻译官" /fānyìguān/ (The Interpreter). I was amazed at how honorable the work of a translator/interpreter could be: getting to work with diplomats and important people that can make a change in the world. At first I was very ambitious and dreamt about creating an organization here in Panama to work for a better future. However, as time passed, this dream faded and now my simple wish is to help those I can by teaching them English or by translating/interpreting. As of now, I am an English teacher in Panama Christian Academy teaching grammar and literature for high schoolers. I may continue with this job, but if there is an opportunity to work with something related to tourism, I would gladly accept since I have always been curious abouth exploring places and learning about cultures.
I have seen that for translation, one need to have good critical thinkinf skills, However, in my personal opinion, I do not often use them since most of the time I just accept things as they are. I tend to not complicate things and just go with the flow. But there have been cases where if I'm really curious about something, I do tend to ask questions like "Why is it like this?" "How does it work?" "What would happen if..." As for translation, using critical thinking has not been part of my process since, personally, translation/interpretation always had one focus: transalate the message. I never thought about the techniques I needed as long as I transmitted the message to the target language. However, in this course I want to work on this aspect to improve my transaltion skill and be a better professional translator.
Below you're going to see some of the projects I have worked on. Hope you enjoy!
Project 1A-1B will be talking about Comet Nishimura and we will get to see how different are the styles written in English and in Spanish.
Project 2A-2B will show how a literary translation may use different methods of translation.
Project 3A-3B will present laws regarding the sea and it wil also show their respective translations.
On this project you will see the editing and translation of a TED Talk about respecting others.
This project will show ChatGPT's opinion about how a person needs enough exposure to have a wikipedia page approved.
Here we will see how the final version of translations from one source text can be changed into different meanings.
Here, a translation of an article in English into Spanish (about the translation of the Bible into Chinese) is presented.