My first word in translation was when I was five years old and someone taught me how to say “one” in Chinese. I was living in Kuala Lumpur at the time. I learned many more words in the following two years we lived there, but I always associated the words I was learning with the equivalent word in my mother tongue, English. There were always word pairs for me to associate meanings.

Fast forward to the summer before fifth grade. By then we were living in Ohio, and my mother was going stir crazy trying to keep her inquisitive daughter’s curiosity in check. She said it was about time for me to be curious in two languages and signed me up for beginning Spanish classes. Most of the classes were about word pairs again and learning easy phrases, but it also introduced the idea of culture with learning language. It was a difficult concept for us to grasp at that age, because words are words, right? We say “dog;” they say “perro.” Translation and learning a language are that easy, right?

I’m fascinated that most people who are not part of the bilingual/multilingual world (and some who are) think that is all that translation encompasses. Sure, a large part of translation is knowing how to use a dictionary, thesaurus, or other reference materials wisely. But it’s also understanding the target culture of the audience. I have known some of my colleagues to fret a day or two about a phrase that is causing them major problems. It’s not just that some things just don’t translate well, it’s that some ideas don’t translate at all. How do you transform an idea into another language without losing the intent of the author in the source language? Many blogs are written about this very question. And I’ve yet to find an easy answer. Translation is art form. While great strides are being made with Machine Translation (MT), we’ve yet to see a computer generate the articulation of a human translator who has spent more than a second’s time in deciding which word or phrase should be used in a source language.

Translation is definitely in a transitional stage at the present time, but that is good. We need to be continually challenged and pushed to be our best and use the best resources out there. No longer are dictionaries the only resource. We have translation memories and computer-assisted translations, to name a couple. But the human element will still be needed because our audience, no matter what language they speak, will always be human. At least, for the time being.