Culture and Translation

I have a thing about translation. Not that I am flawless in translating things, but I always take cultural differences into account. This article in Guardian talks about cultural gap in translating Arabic.

Watching American tv series in Indonesian telly with subtitle, I've noticed how their translator keeps making mistakes when it comes to idioms or cultural things. Most of the time they translated word for word, which of course doesnt make any sense.

The thing is, people often think if you can speak a certain language, you can translate it. It is, of course, true to some extend. However, when it comes to special subject(s), we deal with terms for that specific subject. Legalese is different than economics lingo. Medical terms is different than engineering terms.

I remember someone protested about a translation my friend did on autism, saying that it was wrongly translated. The protester also speaks Dutch, but his background was engineering. I re-read the translation and sided with my friend, which some people accused me of cronyism. That incident made me realized why my other friend upon switching from studying information technology to economics had to re-take Dutch test, because the economics faculty wanted to make sure his Dutch is good enough to study social studies despite he had been living and studying in NL for some years at that point.

So yes, everyone can translate, but it takes more than knowledge of the language to make a good translation.