Challenges With Translating

Translating is hard yet rewarding art. You have to try and interpret what the author is trying to convey and put that to words into another language. Often times, if you translate it word for word, the syntax is weird, or you can't quite capture the metaphor the author is using. It's difficult, yet SO interesting to see what can and cannot be translated into another language.

Syntax

I cannot tell you how many times I had to come back to a work I was translating from French to English and vice versa because my brain just couldn't tell what was right and what was wrong in terms of word order. English is my first language, but I acquired French later, which explains that gap. When I was learning French, I already had a bit of trouble using the right syntax, but this weakness is amplified when I try to translate texts.

Historical Significance

Because I am translating older texts, it can be a challenge to translate terms into the right terms in today's words or even the words used back then. I find it quite interesting to learn about the sentiments of a certain topic at the time the document was conceived, but it definitely takes a lot of time to do. I also need to take into account the perspective the document gives me, because written texts are often a reflection of the author's opinions, even if they try to hide it.

The Websites

I use Gallica for 90% of the texts that I translate, and it crashes every 5 seconds I use it. I've gotten better at not breaking the website by clicking on things and waiting for a bit before I give the website another command. But oh man it slows down my process significantly. I didn't think that this would be a problem when it came to translating, but it's hard to find hard copies of French texts here in rural Indiana ://

BUT this isn't to say that I don't enjoy translating. Quite the opposite actually. I love the challenge of finding the right words, hearing if it sounds right, and seeing how a certain sentence fits in the overall structure of the text. In translating, I get to peer deeper into a time and place I never would have looked into if it wasn't for those historical texts.