Why the "Easiest" Terms Can Often Be the Hardest to Translate

One of the things that has most surprised me in my work as a translator is the fact that it's often basic vocabulary and tiny words that cause the most trouble. If you're doing a good job as a translator and paying close attention to detail, you will certainly have to ask your client for more insight into the text from time to time.

When a translator asks a client for clarification, it doesn't mean that they're bad at their job. In fact, it often means the opposite! The job of the translator is to convert the text into their native language in a way that accomplishes the client's goals. For example, the goal of a marketing text is generally to sell a product, while scientific texts often focus on conveying detailed information.

I've been working on lots of legal texts lately, and have been amused to notice that it's not the complex legal terminology that requires me to ask for further clarification, but instead tiny words in Spanish that can sometimes be ambiguous, especially when immersed in legalese.

In my experience, two of the worst Spanish words in terms of ambiguity are su and le. The term su is the third-person singular possessive adjective ("his"/"her"), while le is the third-person singular personal pronoun ("him/"her"). However, in many Spanish speaking countries they use the third-person singular as a way of formally addressing someone, which allows these terms to also mean "your" and "you" respectively.

While it certainly makes sense for legal professionals and their clients to address each other formally, if they don't also use the formal term for "you", usted (also written Ud.), elsewhere in the text, it's only natural to think that the text may be referring to some other person. Context can often help, but sometimes it can be so unclear that you simply have to reach out to your client and ask.

If you don't ask for help, you risk horribly mistranslating the entire text, which can have a large impact on something of a legal nature. There is a big difference between saying "I informed him" and "I informed you", and so on.

Basic vocabulary words can also cause problems from time to time when translating between Spanish and English. I've particularly noticed this in relation to terms for family members found in literary texts, such as hijos, padres, and hermanos. In Spanish, there is no specific neutral term that refers to "children", "parents", and "siblings". Instead, they use the plural of the corresponding masculine family members, which can also be translated as "sons", "fathers", and "brothers".

In some cases, the ambiguity of these terms doesn't matter at all because it is unnecessary to distinguish between genders, so you can use the neutral English terms. However, sometimes the genders of the people involved can matter, especially in a story. When a character is being introduced at the beginning of a story and it says that they have five hermanos, they could be referring to siblings of both genders or brothers. If you translated it as five "brothers", you could later learn that they actually have four sisters and a brother, which could subtly change how readers view the character.

This is why every detail matters to translators, no matter how small. If you ever do hire a translator and they ask for clarification regarding a term like this that seems simple or unimportant, keep in mind that they're actually hard at word deciphering each and every ambiguity that exists in your original text in order to ensure that they convey your ideas as accurately as possible.

Why Translation Is A Fascinating Career

If you're not a translator, you might think that translation would be a really boring career - after all, a translator's primary task is to take someone else's writing and convert it into a different language (which should be their native language, if you want the translation to sound natural). On the surface, it doesn't sound like a particularly fun or creative job. However, I'm here to tell you that if you think translation is boring, you're completely wrong!

Since I completed my master's degree in translation, I have translated all kinds of texts, and each one has taught me new things and required the use of different skills. When I translated a tourism brochure for a Spanish town on the Mediterranean coast, I spent the week learning about different types of fish that they use in all kinds of delicious recipes, many of which I had never heard of before. If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be researching fish species for work, I would have told you that you were crazy.

A few weeks later, I translated an entire e-book on agile web development. I certainly wasn't an expert on the topic when I started (I didn't even know what "agile" referred to), but through extensive research while translating, I became at least somewhat knowledgeable about the subject. Soon after, the topic randomly came up in conversation with friends, and I was excited to be able to apply that new knowledge.

I spent an entire week on a translation related to industrial lubricants used in machinery. Sure, it was boring, but there was still the occasional amusing moment when I would use Google to verify certain terminology and end up getting results related to other types of lubricants. I've translated marketing materials for furniture sales, cover letters for people applying to jobs, magazine articles about famous artists, and each one has allowed me to dive into new topics and learn new things, as well as increase my Spanish vocabulary (and occasionally my English vocabulary too!).

One of the most fun projects was translating a short story about a dystopian society that is struggling to survive after a cataclysmic event. While most translation projects do have an element of creativity simply because there are always linguistic choices for you to make ("Should I use terrific or fantastic here?"), literary projects are often brimming with opportunities to be creative. As I translated the story, I had to imagine the world the writer had invented, consider how to translate the names of items they'd created that don't exist in reality, and think about how the characters' dialogue should be written, all so that the eventual reader would get just as lost in the story as I had been.

Throughout my degree program, we were told that the best way to be a successful translator is to choose a specialization, and many translators do this. There are people who only translate official documents like CVs, those who stick to legal documents, and people who build an entire business around translating financial reports.

I can certainly see the benefit of doing this, since specializing in one type of translation means you can focus on learning the specific terminology related to it. For example, a legal translator would (hopefully) quickly become an expert in legal terminology and the format of legal texts, and therefore be able to complete translations more quickly, and most likely to a higher quality.

The problem is, I love the variety that being a translator can provide. They say that "variety is the spice of life", and I wholeheartedly agree. I love that one day I can be translating a dry academic paper, and the next day I can be working on a literary translation filled with metaphors. I never know what I'm going to learn about next, which I find exhilarating. I know that I'm new to this business, and perhaps in a year or two I'll decide that I'd rather zero in on one specific topic in order to make my life a bit more routine and the translations more predictable. For now though, I'm just going to enjoy going where the translations take me.

The Problematic Nature of the Word "American"

During last week's Fourth of July celebrations in the United States, I saw something very interesting on the internet: someone wishing their "fellow USians" a happy Independence Day. The use of this incredibly awkward-sounding term led me to start thinking about why they used it, which I can only imagine is due to the problematic nature of using the word "American" to refer to people from the United States.

While many people in the United States have never stopped to think about it, our use of the term "American" as our traditional demonym was probably not the most culturally sensitive choice. Why, you ask? Well, that would be because the "America" in "United States of America" refers to the Western Hemisphere where our country is located, which is also known as America or the Americas since it includes the continents of North America and South America.

This means that technically, every single person from the northernmost point in Canada to the southernmost point in Chile is an American. While our friendly English-speaking neighbors to the north don't seem to mind our appropriation of the term for our own personal use, Spanish speakers throughout the many countries to the south are not always of the same opinion.

In fact, if you've ever studied Spanish or visited a Spanish-speaking country, you might have been surprised to learn that the Spanish demonym for someone from the United States is estadounidense, which rolls off of the tongue so much more nicely than "United Statesan" ever could. In Spain, for example, if you say that you're americano or americana, you might be asked what country you're from, since those terms are generally applied to anyone from the Americas. The Real Academia Española, the official language institution of Spain, even suggests that use of the term americano to refer to people from the United States should be avoided.

Throughout most of the rest of the world however, the terms used to refer to people from the United States are often cognates of the word "American", such as américain in French and Amerikaner in German. They may have chosen these terms because it was easier than trying to create a nice-sounding demonym from their translation of "United States", but they also probably didn't care much about using it to refer only to people from the U.S. since most of their speakers don't live in the Americas, and therefore couldn't be upset by it.

With that said, while I do think it is incredibly unfortunate that the United States has been using a culturally insensitive term to refer to its people since the late 1700s, I don't think there's much we can do to change it now. People have tried to popularize alternative terms for centuries, but they've never caught on. They include Usonian, the aforementioned USian, Washingtonian, and worst of all Columbian, based on the poetic name for the United States, because what the world really needed was confusion as to whether they're referring to people from the United States or Colombia.

In the end, I think that all we can do is accept the mistake that was made centuries ago and try our best not to offend the millions of other Americans throughout our hemisphere. When visiting other countries in the Americas, it shouldn't be too hard to use estadounidense instead of americano or to simply say that we're "from the United States" instead of using the word "American"