When you look at these 4 essential translation skills, you’ll understand why most bilinguals don’t make great translators.
To start with, you may be surprised to know that many people who speak another language, and perhaps most, fall well short of the required language skills needed for professional translation.
Then there are the required personality traits - if you’re a speed over substance person, forget it!
And how many of us are actually damn fine writers? Yes, that’s another of the key skills everyone needs to be a decent translator. After all translators need to produce well-worded texts people will enjoy reading - across all sorts of styles. Like marketing spiel, legalise, technical materials, even colloquial language at times. How many of us have the skills to do that!
On top of this, translating any chunk of text involves pretty complex mental processing. Which means if you don’t follow a thorough translation process, your translations are unlikely to consistently be up to scratch.
Which makes our last required skill (well it isn’t really a “skill”, but I know you’ll forgive us) make total sense.
These aren’t the only skills needed for quality translation, but we think they’re the key ones. Certainly they’ll pretty quickly sort out which bilinguals have what it takes, and which ones don’t.
Make sure you head over to our blog article for a slightly different take on this: www.pactranz.com/blog/the-tran...
And while you’re there check out our other useful articles and guides.