Myths and misunderstandings about the translation industry

The world is populated by multiple languages, and each language has thousands of monolingual or bilingual speakers. Any effort to establish a translation company is a challenging task because the number of potential competitors is huge. Once you start your translation business, you'll soon learn the serious competition and translation myths that still prevail in today's wireless communications world.

Every day, as a translator, you face increasing struggles from misinformed clients who know very little about the translation industry or who generally have a misunderstanding about translators and the translation agency London. Most often, translators need to teach clients about the profession to shed light on the myths that give the impression of continuing to move on year after year. Here are some of the most important myths and misconceptions that can be used as instructional tools to help your clients appreciate what you do as a translator:

1. Translators can speak two or more languages ​​- this is one of the most fruitful myths found outside the translation industry. One must understand that simply knowing different languages ​​does not mean that a person can convert any subject to those languages.

2. Translators can decode any topic if the material is in a language they know: it must be understood that it is not always necessary for a translator to translate any topic if the content is in a language he or she knows. Every talented translator specializes in different but correlated areas and this allows you to keep track of changes in your profession and keep you well informed about current trends. If any translator declares that they can translate anything that is an inexperienced or poor translator.

3. Translation from one language to another (ie Japanese or Spanish to English) is equivalent to translating in the opposite order (ie English to Japanese or Spanish): there are few talented translators who can perform expert translations in both languages. In most cases, clients believe that the execution of the translation is the same and it does not matter how the translator performs the translation. Customers need to understand that translators have core languages ​​and that translator and client are generally of primary importance for the translator to translate into this area of ​​expertise.

4. A native narrator is always a superior translator than a non-native.
It is the next big myth circulating in the translation industry. Being a native narrator of a language does not necessarily guarantee that an individual is qualified enough to translate enough. Eg. There may be a billion native Japanese speakers worldwide, but only a few can trust that they will own the decision they will make to choose whether a translation is linguistically correct in a given business context. We should never think that a native narrator is a talented translator in his own language. For any language, translation requires discipline, study and continuous practice.

5. Only translators affiliated with a professional or certified translation company can perform effective translation - there are several translators around the world who perform excellent translation tasks without any association with any organization. However, it is not important that every professional organization called is a governing body. You need to understand that a list of satisfied clients of a translator is a much better sign of a translator's ability.

6. You can check the accuracy of a translation by doing a reverse translation: The next common misconception is that the value of a translation can be checked by having another translator who can translate a translated text back into the source language. However, this statement is totally false, and in fact the opposite is true; The worse the translation, the closer the reverse translation becomes to the original. The reason for this is that a poor translation generally follows the wording of the original, but not the meaning.

7. Translation is basically an informal industry with extremely low profit margins - this is again the most common misconception in the translation profession. Recent studies have found that many people in the Netherlands and Eastern Europe have the long-established image of the translator, where the translator has to enslave himself from dawn to dusk. Although the translation process is really laborious, and despite all the computer tools.