Translation Matters #1 - Assistance from Unexpected Ways

A translator will get help from any unexpected ways.

As a user of two most popular languages, English and Mandarin Chinese, I chose to dive into a translator career almost ten years ago. In these years, among all the works of mine, I’ve already dealt with over 20 books that had been translated from English into Mandarin Chinese.

For me, the most important skill of being a translator, besides capability of the target language and the source language, is the data-research ability. A translator may face the knowledge coming from any possible fields. While a person is impossible to master everything from everywhere, the data-research ability is the most powerful tool for achieving a translation task.

However, a translator may sometime face the challenge of “not finding any possible answers” during translation work. Let’s take my personal experience a couple of weeks ago as an example. It begins with a small working habit of mine.

Just like always, I first open Twitch window on my screen as a “background music”. For those who don’t know, Twitch is a website for PC and video gamers to stream when playing games, thereby sharing the real-time video of the game screen plus maybe the picture or in-time image of the players on the screen to have a realistic interaction with stream viewers.

I switch to one of my favorite game streamer who is an American, and then I start to translate in another window as usual. After a while, i meet a word that I cannot find on any dictionary with a proper meaning matching the context of the book, nor google any useful information for that specific word, “premier”.

According to on-line dictionary, possible definitions for “premier” include “prime minister” as a noun, “chief”, “main”, “primary”, “topmost”, “earliest”, or “oldest” as an adjective. Also, I even have a result of “Premier League” googled as a football league in England. However, all these definitions fail to fit in the context of the book I’m translating.

While I feel a little desperate of not getting any positive result, I come up with an idea I’ve never imagined before.

I asked the streamer on my Twitch window.

Streamers will definitely be happy and willing to have interaction with viewers. I raise the question to ask if that vocabulary has any other rare meanings. With the streamer’s reply, I finally figure out that the book author may have the word misspelled (however, such misspelling appears on certain web pages). The correct word shall be “premiere”, with the definition of “first performance of drama, movie, or shows”, which perfectly fits in the context of the book.

To be honest, for a non-native speaker, such misspelling, even only lacking one letter “e”, causes a huge difficulty. Since this little event, I realize that the assistance for a translator will possibly come from any unexpected ways.

Also, dabbling in multi-field knowledge or having different types of leisure activities will definitely be beneficial for a professional translator who needs information sources as many as possible.