Translation is Darn Hard!

I have never taken the topic of translation lightly. When you grow up in a bilingual city like mine (El Paso, Texas), translation of English to Spanish or Spanish to English is a daily need of the population.

And when I say 'translation', I mean it in the broad sense of  'changing into another language'. Oral interpretation takes certain skills and knowledge, while written translation requires others.  Both types make me a little nervous!

When I worked in the administration offices of a local school district, someone was always trying to hunt down another employee who would be willing to do an English to Spanish translation as an "extra duty as assigned".  And these seekers usually thought it would take just a few clicks on the computer to produce a translation that met their looming deadline. I was often the target of those requests because I was in charge of the foreign language program.

The problem was that I am a native speaker of English and had no business trying to translate anything into my second language, Spanish.  Spanish to English would work fine, but English to Spanish?  Oh, the pitfalls that awaited me. My verbs would be well conjugated, my accents would be impeccable, but my word choice, phrasing and idioms would always be those of a second language speaker. 

Maybe my translation wouldn't be quite this bad!

One day I received an even more difficult assignment.  Some poor Spanish-speaking soul was being given a formal hearing at the administration building, and the professional translator had not shown up.  I was tapped to serve as the interpreter, turning the flowery language of the English-speaking lawyer into the more colloquial Spanish of our area.  What a nightmare!  I hope the person being questioned was not convicted on the strength of my translation!

The moral to this story is that a second language learner does not a translator make.  I'm very glad that Duolingo, my latest language learning passion, allows me to translate from Spanish or Portuguese into my native language of English. Now my next decision is this:   Shall I be social and enter into cyberdiscussions with those editing my translations? Translating is certainly not for the fainthearted!