翻译Translation VS Interpretation

Translation VS Interpretation

To many Chinese students who are learning a foreign language, the only difference between translation and interpretation is in the medium: interpreters translate orally, while translators do his job in written forms.

Both interpretation and translation presuppose a certain love of language and good knowledge of more than one tongue. However, it is certain and clear that they are different in the training, skills, and talents needed.

The key skill of an excellent translator is the ability to writing well, and to expresses his/her self clearly in the target language. that is why many professional translators almost always translate in only one direction—translating only into their mother language. Even to bilingual people, it is hard for them to express themselves on a given subject equally well in two different languages.

And many excellent translators are far from being bilingual. They may not, and needn’t be fluent speakers of the source language (the language of the original text being translated). Their successful performance is based on the ability to understand the source language well and the culture of the country where the original text come from, and, with a good library of dictionaries and reference materials, to render those materials into the target language.

An interpreter, on the other hand, is something else. The interpreter has to translate in both directions on the spot without the use any dictionaries.

There are two types of interpreting: consecutive interpreting and simultaneous interpreting.

In the most popular forms consecutive interrelating, the interpreter sits in a booth, wearing a pair of earphones and speaking into a microphone. Strictly, the consecutive is a misnomer. The interpreters can't start interpreting until they understand the general meaning of the sentence. The interpreters may not be able to say a single word until they hear the very end of the sentence in the source language!

It is evident that how hard the job of an interpreter is: he or she should be translating the sentence into the target language and simultaneously listening to the next sentence.

One of the key skills of interpreting is the decisiveness. It is obvious that there is no time to weigh the merits of various translations or to recollect the just right idiom in the target language.

Any delay can cause the loss of a few words (even a thought) that the speaker said. And because the speaker may be far away, or even in a different room from the interpreter, the loss may be

permanent.

During the consecutive interpreting, the speaker stops every 1 to five minutes (usually at the end of a paragraph or a complete thought), and the interpreter then follows the speaker immediately to translate what was said into the target language.

One of the key skills involved in consecutive interpreting is note-taking, because few interpreters can memorize the whole paragraph in a short time without losing any details. But the an interpreter’s notes are different from those of a stenographer, because writing down every words in source language only makes the interpreter’s job more difficult when the interpreter should translate the speech into the target language.

Many professional interpreters develop their own ideographic symbology. The method allows them to memorize the speakers’ thought independent from the source language instead of every word. In this way, the interpreters can translate more authentically and without too much bund of the souse language in their works.

In other words, what the interpreters do is to change the words into meaning, and then express the meaning in another language. So interpreting is substantially paraphrasing.

Besides, interpretation requires reasonably accuracy, fluency, articulacy, completeness and timing. So a qualified interpreter needs to have good personalities, which are confidence, sensibility and expressive proficiency.

Although there are vast differences between translation and interpretation, they have one thing in common besides the good knowledge of two languages: they must understand the text and the subject matter they are translating well. We should always remember that translating something from one language into another language is using words of one language to substitute those of another.

It is a matter of understanding the thought expressing in source language and then explaining it in another language. That is just like you can’t explain one’s thought to others when you can’t totally understand it, you can not translate without comprehensively understanding the subject matter of the source language.