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What is Translation?
Speaking two languages doesn’t make you a translator
Translating does not simply mean transferring the meaning of words from one language to another, but rather it is a complex process that includes a series of phases, which often take place in a few moments in the mind of a translator, but other times can take longer.
These include, first, reading a segment of the original text (typically a sentence). This may seem trivial if the text in question is in a language that uses the Latin alphabet, but even in this case, things can get complicated if there are special characters that are not included in the native language (which is usually the target one) of the translator.
The next step is its understanding as a whole, which does not stop at that of individual words. There are words that can have completely different meanings, despite being written the same way, i.e. the so-called homographs. Furthermore, the meaning varies further based on the context in which they appear, which includes other words in the same sentence and how these are used (the order in which they are placed, phrases, idiomatic expressions, punctuation), the content of the other sentences of the text, the specific topic covered in the text, and the field within which that topic falls. And again, certain fields usually have a specific terminology, which…
