2 weeks passed since I worked in CCJK, the 1st impression ran out of my mind was passion and vitality. All the colleagues around me are quite young and energetic, it makes me quite excited because I like to work in such kind of environment.
As one member in Linguistic Dept., I noticed a huge and heavy responsibility falls on my shoulder by compared with my previous job. To me, original material from customer side is authoritative and how to thoroughly understand and converted into native language that is easy to read and understand, it’s really a challenge to me.
Take one example for illustration, this project from Tyco titled as “Raising A Concern”. This project was mainly about speaking up methods and resources in Tyco if employees subjected to unfair treatment. During translation process, I found the context of this material was closely combined with strong background knowledge.
If want to translate accurately, catch the main idea is the 1st necessity. So I overviewed the whole passage and understood the general idea of this article; But in the reading process, some unfamiliar words and phrases occurred and I marked out and checked exact meaning on internet to facilitate further comprehension in the follow-up translation.
Modified version was sent to me 1 day later, compared the re-editing article from SZ editor, I realized plenty of translation skills need to be mastered and summarized into below 4 aspects.
1. Expansion the scope of knowledge; (this Tyco article included vast knowledge of legal and corporate culture, accumulation much more knowledge of such aspect will facilitate the translation.)
2.Words selection should be improved; (Translated English into Chinese, we used to adding lots of colloquial words such as “的”,”你&您”,”一个&一些”; In fact, these words are completely redundant, deleting them made the whole translated article more readable and professional. Also one English word translated into Chinese with lots of different meanings, how to choose the most suitable one and meet context requirement, this is what I should be strengthened.
3. To punctuate and using native expression correctly; (sometimes English sentences are quite long with many attributive and adverbial clauses included, correctly handling these clauses during converted into Chinese is a major difficulty, I have no idea where should these clauses go with; So proper dealing these clauses and put in the right position means long sentence handling is a piece of cake to you and you can process well in future. I should focus on this and spend more time to master such technique.
4. Attention to details, particularly in punctuation and wrong typing; (Mixed English and Chinese punctuation and used them together in the translated article. Actually this is a great distress to editor, she need spend more time to check and correct it. So once we finished the translation, we need go back and re-check the translated version before submitting out.
Overall, to be a competent and qualified translator, not only improve and strengthen basic skills in English, but also through a lot of practice and training to improve accuracy and quality of translated articles. I will do my best to conquer the difficulties encountered in work, submitting high quality translation material to customer to fulfill their requirements.