Nowadays, in our globalized society, we are faced with translations everywhere: the packaging on the food we eat, the packaging on the medicine we buy, the books we buy for studying and so much more. We may not think about how frequently we read translated texts. And it is said that a good translation from one language to another should go unnoticed by the reader. The work of translators and other language professionals may seem invisible to the eye, but you should not underestimate the importance of their work.
The work of language professionals is essential for globalization. Due to Globalization nations, societies and multinational corporations are dependent of each other and integrate on a political, social and economic level. This means that effective communication becomes essential for good collaborations. The key word here is communication. It is exactly here, that the work of language professionals becomes important.
The language professionals that work at the UN include editors, interpreters, verbatim reporters and more. Their work contains the translation of speeches, reports and documents into the six official UN languages. The languages are Arabic, French, Russian, English, Spanish and Chinese. These translations are essential for the international cooperation at the UN.
Moreover, language professionals around the world contribute to preserving our cultural heritage and making it more accessible. Important works of art and historical artifacts are translated into hundreds or thousands of languages. Likewise, the translation of scientific works makes knowledge equally accessible for everybody.
The International Translation Day is closely related to the 16th goal of the Sustainable Development Goals, which is called “Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions”. The translation of languages improves and evokes inclusiveness, which leads to better communication and a stronger relationship between the different nations in the institutions. Good communication in institutions is vital for finding solutions to global issues.
The goal of any translator is to produce a translation that has the same meaning as the source-language text and is written in a natural form of the translated language. In order to achieve that, language professionals usually follow exact steps during their translation progress. This strategy states that one should first read through the text to understand the meaning. Secondly, one should translate in chunks of 5 to 10, which is essential for a natural translation. After the last step, which includes reading the translation again and concentrating on the quality of the expressions as well as the style, a perfect translation should be achieved.
Due to existing technological advances, the work of language professionals has changed a lot. After the invention of a special assisting software, interpreters could increase the speed as well as the quality of their translations. Apart from that, the translation industry was also influenced by machine translation. As these systems are nowadays available for everyone on the internet, the usage increased a lot during the last few, years, which led to a massive improvement of these systems.
During the translation process, many problems can occur. Interpreters must be aware of the intention of a particular word because even if words seem equivalent, sometimes they have different meanings depending on the context. Another difficulty could be metaphorical expressions since one has to keep the meaning of those sentences. Moreover, the translation of proper names is also part of this category because often they have a specific meaning in a language that can get lost when translated. Due to the existence of expressions that cannot be found in other languages, more complications can appear during translation. As one can see, language professionals have to deal with many issues during translating, which shows how much we have to appreciate their work for our society.
Many of you may be wondering now what the future of translation is going to look like. First, it must be mentioned that advanced technologies have a huge impact on the translation industry and artificial intelligence is getting more accurate, more efficient and more popular every day. However, humans will still play an important role in translation since they are the only ones who can bring across the intended message. Although machine translation can facilitate our everyday lives, it is never going to be able to replace human translators.