SLL 130 Translation English to Spanish I (3) [Traducción inglés-español I] Examination of the techniques and strategies of translation from English to Spanish. Linguistic contrasts between English and Spanish through a selection of texts with Spanish cultural, literary, and historical themes.
Translation is such an important part of society which helps people understand things; whether it be a film, an important document, a street sign, or even a text message. In this class, we learned the basic techniques and strategies to translate from English to Spanish. We talked about the linguistic contrasts between the two languages and how we need to focus on those changes when we are translating cultural, literary or historical documents. In this class, we had workbooks with many documents that we had to translate by hand, with a computer, or interpret in class. We had many opportunities translate a variety of documents. We also discussed the fluidity that documents need when they are being translated. For example, if you use the informal “tú” it must be consistent throughout the text and you should not refer to the reader with the formal “usted”. The same could work in the opposite way. Documents must be consistent including the tenses that are being used in the document. In this class, we translated over 10 documents.
For myself, the toughest part of the translating course was making sure that my grammar was correct. Sometimes, I forget whether I should use the perfect or imperfect preterite for example. Thankfully, I had classmates that would read over my assignments and the professor was always available to help whenever I needed it. Translating in the 21st century must be so much easier than 20 years ago. I had access to the internet whenever I didn’t know what a word was. I never had to open up a dictionary nor a translation book. The internet is definitely one of the biggest helps when translating, but it cannot be the only source you use to translate. Sites like Google Translate cannot always accurately translate things, so when translating documents, no one should rely on those to do the work for them.
As a final project for the class, we all got to select a text that had been translated and explain why certain words were chosen for the translation. For this assignment, I decided to choose a song from the Disney movie, “Moana” because I knew that Disney tends to translate their films into Latin American Spanish and Castellano for Spain. I analyzed the three texts (Latin American Spanish, Castellano, and English), and how they all differed or were similar.
Translation is such an important part of society which helps people understand things; whether it be a film, an important document, a street sign, or even a text message. In this class, we learned the basic techniques and strategies to translate from English to Spanish. We talked about the linguistic contrasts between the two languages and how we need to focus on those changes when we are translating cultural, literary or historical documents. In this class, we had workbooks with many documents that we had to translate by hand, with a computer, or interpret in class. We had many opportunities translate a variety of documents. We also discussed the fluidity that documents need when they are being translated. For example, if you use the informal “tú” it must be consistent throughout the text and you should not refer to the reader with the formal “usted”. The same could work in the opposite way. Documents must be consistent including the tenses that are being used in the document. In this class, we translated over 10 documents.
For myself, the toughest part of the translating course was making sure that my grammar was correct. Sometimes, I forget whether I should use the perfect or imperfect preterite for example. Thankfully, I had classmates that would read over my assignments and the professor was always available to help whenever I needed it. Translating in the 21st century must be so much easier than 20 years ago. I had access to the internet whenever I didn’t know what a word was. I never had to open up a dictionary nor a translation book. The internet is definitely one of the biggest helps when translating, but it cannot be the only source you use to translate. Sites like Google Translate cannot always accurately translate things, so when translating documents, no one should rely on those to do the work for them.
As a final project for the class, we all got to select a text that had been translated and explain why certain words were chosen for the translation. For this assignment, I decided to choose a song from the Disney movie, “Moana” because I knew that Disney tends to translate their films into Latin American Spanish and Castellano for Spain. I analyzed the three texts (Latin American Spanish, Castellano, and English), and how they all differed or were similar.