How to spice up your translation

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Usch Pilz
Usch Pilz
Local time: 08:48
English to German
+ ...
Bread and Butter Jun 4, 2016

For literary translators pretty much all of this goes without saying. Bread and butter.

 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 07:48
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
So true of non-technical translations Jun 7, 2016

All of my work requires more thought and care over style than over terminology. Generally speaking, anyone who speaks reasonable French can understand every word of my source texts. But very often anything like a literal translation would be awful in English. There are rarely two consecutive words that have retained their position in the sentence, grammatical form etc in my target texts. But normally each element is there in some form or other.

The only issue I have with this article
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All of my work requires more thought and care over style than over terminology. Generally speaking, anyone who speaks reasonable French can understand every word of my source texts. But very often anything like a literal translation would be awful in English. There are rarely two consecutive words that have retained their position in the sentence, grammatical form etc in my target texts. But normally each element is there in some form or other.

The only issue I have with this article is that it encourages readers to involve the client in target style/word choices. How many clients know the target language well enough? Of course, when you translate into English you'll have clients who understand it, but they can rarely judge our work accurately. Most will prefer something literal, given the choice, simply because they think it can't be too wrong.
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How to spice up your translation







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