The secret panacea for translators: Tips to improve your translation skills
Every professional activity has its own insights and tricks to master them and usually practice is the most effective method to excel at any job. In this sense, translation is not any different than any other activity, but there are many other means to (unconsciously) craft your way to be a REALLY GOOD translator.
Many translation students may be asking themselves the same question everyday: What does it take to be a very successful translator? Unfortunately, this is not a simple question and everyone has their own secret of success, but I recommend you to hear the devastating truth behind this recurring enigma once and for all: success can only be attained by constant improvement.
Yeah, that’s right, let’s get ready to hear what we never wanted to hear (Spoiler Alert!):
Dear students and general readers, there is not a magic list of tips that you’ll automatically apply to your own translation method and will make you successful instantly, nor a secret remedy to obtain the necessary knowledge to be better or having more solutions than Google Translate. As one of my favorite and most inspirational NBA basketball players restlessly summarized, “We’re talking about practice”.
By practice you’ll be probably thinking, “Of course, the more professional experience you have, the better professional you are”, and you’d be absolutely right; it’s a logical correlation and it usually works like this, but that’s not what the whole point is about. What I actually mean is that even the best professional translators should be practicing a little everyday in order to improve their translation skills and be up to the next challenge.
Some ways to put your skills into practice — putting billable work aside — could be volunteering translation, prepare and review glossaries and TMs from certain specialized fields to feed your CAT tools and get ready for the next job, or learning a new software/gadget that could be applied to render a more valuable translation service.
Practice makes perfect, don’t they say? Surely it will have an impact on your future translations, since it is important to “automatize” some techniques, and the outcome will also be noticeably better in a long term. However, this statement doesn’t always apply to professions that require a certain degree of creativity; otherwise, translators would have been already easily replaced by machine translation or an underdeveloped AI. It is also important for translators to feed their own creativity and to take advantage of the available resources.
Here there are some useful resources (most of them are free of charge, so save your lame excuses) that you might have not thought about and that you need to include in your daily routine:
The importance of being in constant learning
A couple of paragraphs above I’ve mentioned the importance of learning new softwares and gadgets to improve your translation management, but how about the importance of being updated in your specialized field? This might be one of the key tips through your improvement process. It is a well-known fact that translation is a fiercely competitive professional field, that’s why specialization in a couple of fields becomes necessary. You know, there might be hundreds of Japanese into Spanish translators, but not so many of them will be specialized in the tech or financial field, for instance.
Specialization is a necessary step to accessing exclusive and valuable market niches, but it also requires continuous updating, both in the source and the target language. As if they were some kind of ocean current, languages (along with specialized fields) are constantly changing, evolving, adapting new elements and affecting people’s culture, hence the importance of being always updated about new forms of language and how new resources and modern culture are affecting them.
Some good choices to keep yourself updated in your specialized field would be reading specialized blogs and publications in your source and target language(s) — some of them are even free of charge — , since they will provide you the necessary knowledge to keep up with what’s happening right now in that field. Also, attending conferences and events of your specialized field will make you meet people with new ideas or just know about the latest feature in the market.
And not everything is about specialized knowledge. Grammatical correctness is also essential to excel in your translations –apart from the importance of giving a good impression to your clients-, that’s why following the latest grammar trends makes no harm and, to be honest, it could make you a better person in your daily life.
Have a safe translation environment
Despite the growing competition in this field, the translation industry is known to be one of the most supportive professional communities. As a translator, you will always have moments when you get stuck in a certain paragraph of a text and it’s completely normal to have doubts.
Here is where having a safe translation circle could always be helpful: follow other translators in social media, learn from them and share your own experiences. Most of them would be willing to help you in certain moments; maybe you could learn some news on your specialized field, learn translation techniques that you didn’t even think of using yet, or just make supportive, professional friends that you can actually meet personally.
A great tip for beginners would be to follow experienced translators in the field they want to work. Some of these translators even teach face-to-face or online courses about many features of translation, where you can also benefit from their own experience in a certain field or situation and their specific knowledge of the industry.
There is also another useful resource called Webinars, which basically are online interviews to a special professional guest that are conducted by a moderator. Attendees can interact with the guests asking whatever questions they like and, most importantly, you can do it without going out of home! Even if the webinar doesn’t deal exclusively with your specialized field, it is always helpful to know how different is the guest’s method to your own and it could be the necessary pinch of inspiration to realize what you’re doing wrong or how could you do certain things in a better and more productive way.
And the last and maybe the least expected tip: Never stop reading
Some of the most celebrated authors of all time, such as Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes used to claim that they used to read everything within their reach, “even the torn papers they found in the streets”. Obviously for translators, as language specialists, reading every sort of text in their working languages is also a necessary step to be a great professional.
Above all, translation is a job that requires creative thinking and reliability, and what could be better than reading texts (books, publications, personal experiences and, essentially, every kind of text) that might be helping you to better understand the source language and produce high-quality and creative texts for your translations? Just make sure to read from people that inspire you the most and feed your mind appropriately!
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