The Most Common Translation Mistakes

Simply knowing how to speak in different languages doesn’t mean that you are mastering in translating it. Translation skills need more than just roughly knowing what it meant. Even if you know exactly what it said, sometimes people need to take some times to translate non-native language to a native language, and vice versa.

Beginner translators struggle with the correct translation word per word because they still need to get confident and processed important rules regarding with translation. However, translating can’t be done by understanding the rough meaning of a whole mistake, neither can’t translating per word. So to begin, these are the most common translation mistakes ever made.

A lot of novice translators make a mistake by translating script word for word. To be a good translator, you need to interpret a script to another language in the same style as it is intended. Different language can have different sentence structure; therefore you can’t justify the translation of English to Arabic for instance.

Use a dictionary to make sure you truly understand the meaning of the word and the proper way to use it. Sometimes the same word has different meaning, or probably the same meaning but should be used in a different situation. You can convince yourself by having your script reviewed by a native speaker of that language.

Second, not every word can be translated. Certain words do not meant to be translated, so you can just write the original word with a quotation mark. For example you can’t translate “Eid Mubarak” or “Ka’bah” since they are related to certain religion and cultural aspects.

Third, try to fully understand the whole aspects of styling in one language before you begin to translate. Interpreting a script without knowing the appropriate style can change the essence of the script. To pass on the real meaning of a topic, it is very important to translate the document in the right tone. For example, the tone in a teenage book will be different with the one for formal learning book.

And for the last translation mistake, don’t exaggerate the meaning of the words. Sometimes we think it sounds better to add more words and make it more dramatic. Sadly it depends on what are you working on. When you are a professional translator, you have to know what your client need and what he expects from you. You want to keep it simple for personal use. While for publishing purpose, you need to follow certain guidelines of the publisher. Now that you know the most common translation mistakes, you can definitely do better next time!

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