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Translation

Peace upon you all, friends and members,

We all know the importance of translation and how it brings different cultures together, allowing people in one side of the world to read-in their own language- what’s been written by people in the other end of the world-many years ago-, giving them an idea-even if the slightest-of how others live, socialize and react to the events that happens on their planet.

I wrote this topic so those of you who might think of or want to pursuit a career in translation have a basic idea of “how the Translation process” works

hell. ..if someone red this topic and had this look - the look of someone

who learned a new thing- I'll be more than happy.

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What is Translation

?

The word translation itself is the product of combining two Latin words:

Trans which means across

And lat which means to carry

Therefore the word translate meaning “to carry across”, which is exactly what you do while translating “you carry the words across from one language to another language”

The formal definition of translation is this: a written communication in a second language having the same meaning as the written communication in a first language.

In the translation process we have two key elements:

SL:

Subject Language.

Being the original language you’re translating from.

TL:

Target Language.

Being the second language you’re translating to.

Problems you’ll encounter as a translator:

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Cultural specific terms.

In every culture there are some unique terms which can’t be translated for the lack of synonymous words or even close words, like the word

:

الزكاة

in the Islamic and Arabic culture, which proven to be challenging to translate, for there is no similar word or act in the western culture-assuming we want to translate from Arabic to English-so, they came up with an interesting solution for this kind of unique terms called “Transliteration”.

Transliteration is a way to deal with the unique cultural terms so they would be readable in foreign languages, what you do in transliteration is this:

You take a unique word like

: الزكاة

in our language-this being Arabic to English case as we mentioned before-and write it down in English letters, you flag it with a number-or any other mark for that matter- , and then you explain it in the footnote of the page; the outcome will be something like this

:

Zakat* is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, which the one who denies them is not considered a Muslim(this being the passage)

____________________________________________.

Zakat is the third of the five pillars of Islam and it refers to spending a fixed portion of one’s wealth for the poor, or…or…... or(this being the footnote…

Needles to say we use transliteration a lot, and especially with names.

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Environment

and it influence.

People usually use expressions inspired by their environment in their day-to-day life, expressions if you translated literally might not have the same meaning or the sought for impact.

For example: conditions like freeze and warm differ in ways you might never think of, like when we use a phrase like this in our language as an expression of relief:

لقد اثلجت صدري بهذا الخبر.

In short that means its good news that you just heard, but if you translate it literally it will be something like this “you’ve frozen my chest with this news”!!?? Well, you definitely don’t want to say that in public, because it sounds absolutely stupid!

The reason we used the term “Frozen” is because we live in a hot environment most of the year, making “Cold” days something we look forward to, hence “Frozen = Relief”!. But, that’s just in our side of the world, and specially the Middle East. In the other hand, people in countries like Russia suffer from the fiercely cold weather, so talking to them about “Frozen” things won’t exactly make them happy; so, what can we do in situations like this?

What we do is this; we look at what’s beyond the words, we look for the real meaning, and pass that meaning to the receiver, confused? Well, it’s not that hard, in our little example earlier e mentioned that we used the phrase” You’ve frozen….” As an expression of relief because we think of “Frozen” as a good thing, so what we need to do now, is to express the same feeling-which is relief- in a terms that people in cold areas can accept (needles to say that the majority if English speakers live in cold places) so, instead of just literally translating it, we rephrase it, and we say:

You warmed my heart with this news.

Now this has the same meaning as the original phrase, and stands -in away or another-for relief.

I hope its clear, let’s move on then

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Idioms

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Idioms are specific expressions which are familiar to the native speakers of a language. Idioms usually never get used in formal writings such as academic writing for a bunch of reasons

Idioms are informal- they are more typical of speech

.

-Idioms are culture-specific- they may not be understood by all readers

.

-Idioms interfere with clear communication- academic ideas are best presented directly and transparently.

here you can find a useful information regarding Idioms

Figures Of Speech

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some examples

Once in a blue moon

.

It’s an expression of rarity

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-To bite the hand that feeds the one

As to say “someone is ungrateful

”.

-He has a finger in every pie

Stands for curiosity, used to describe the man who can’t just let the people be, always looking for something, always asking around, knows something about every one, in short, the kind of guy you don’t want to be

.

-The walls have ears

.

It simply means

: الجدران لها اذانٍ!!

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The context

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The context is a major issue when it comes to translating, because many words have various meanings depending on the context. The different meanings of the same word are called the Semantic range of the word, some words have a small semantic range and others have a large one…so, the context really is a matter of a great concern.

Now, if we take a word like (facility) as an example, and put in three different sentences...We can see how much the context really matters in terms of the semantic range

:

A- She has a great facility in learning languages

.

Facility here means the ability too learn without any difficulties, translation will be:

بامكانها ان تتعلم اللغات بيسر بالغ.

B-The most important facility of traveling now days is traveling by plane

.

Facility here means: Mean, as in “the most important mean of traveling….”, translating will be:

اهم وسيلة للسفر هذه الأيام, هي السفر بالطائرة.

C-The radar facilities in Cairo airport are periodically updated to cope with the increasing volume of traffic

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Facility here means: Building

“منشأة او مرفق”

, although the Doctor who was giving this lecture somehow insisted-for some strange reason-that it means: Device

“جهاز”
, so I asked him why is that, and he said "not now" but I wasn’t willing to just let it go…as I was getting ready to ask him again, he gave me this look, Accept-it-or-beat-it kind of look…that alongside with the fact that I never did sign up for this subject-but somehow it sounded a hell of a lot more fun than “Economical Resources”-was more than enough to convince me, so I kept it to myself.

Anyhow, I looked it up in http://www.thefreedictionary.com/, and I couldn’t find any indications that it might mean “Device”…maybe someone can help us out here?? Personally, I would go with

“

منشأة او مرفق”

anytime, and the translation will be something like this

:

منشات الرادار في مطار القاهرة يتم تحديثها بشكل دوري لتواكب الوتيرة المتزايدة لحجم المرور.

One last thing to say, “Facility” is a word with a great semantic range, its meaning in the third example is not even close to its meaning in the first example, it might get a bit confusing but…it’s just a matter of time.

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Political expressions

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The language of politics differs from our common day to day language, so you should be cautious while translating a political passage, for if we leave the possibility of you dying of boredom while doing this aside, there is always the possibility of you mistranslating something and causing unnecessary problem between two political rivals-(this being the dramatic version)-or you could simply misunderstand something, either way you probably won’t be happy with the results.

As we all know, politicians tend to play with words; and as far as my knowledge goes, I know nothing about a dictionary for political terms-you can look it up if you want- and the ways to enrich your political terms vocabulary that I know about involves sitting down and watching news for hours or, better yet, reading a book about…POLITICS!! Needless to say, you ought to be a very patient guy to do either of those things, because if you ask me, politics and whatever comes with them are flat-out BORING

.

Some political terms to help you out as a beginning

:

-The stick and the carrot policy

.

Rings a bell? Yes and that bald dude is still doing what he has been doing since…well, forever.

Which is trying to catch Bugs Bunny, remember that little trick he used to pull? The one with a carrot beneath a box held up by a stick? As we all know, Bugs never bought it but in real life politicians use that name to indicate to

:

سياسة الترغيب و الترهيب.

-Blackout

.

Usually used with media it means

:

تعتيم اعلامي.

-

Lame duck

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Once important dude, now just a weakling

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-Zionist entity

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Obviously

:

الكيان الصهيوني.

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Abbreviations

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Abbreviations can and will give you serious headaches, for you’ll never what they stand for half the time, and when you look them up, you’ll get more confused…this assuming you’re a common guy like me

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-SPCA

-SPCC

-ESL: English as a second language.

-EFL: English as a foreign language.

-GATT

-FAO

A piece of advice: try using online dictionaries in order to figure out what the abbreviations stand for, DO NOT ever use a search engine like: Google and Yahoo.

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At the end, I hope someone will find this useful, for it took me quite a while to go throw my papers to gather information and stuff

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Waiting for your comments

and God bless you all

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