As professionals in the language services sector are well aware, a translator’s task is rarely limited to the interlinguistic conversion between two languages, a concept that is entrenched in the collective mindset but that is slowly being debunked as the translating activity becomes more prominent in our society and translators “educate” third parties, such as translation clients, that are key for this purpose. In fact, the current situation in the translation market is partly due to the clients’ perspective when they are in the midst of procuring translation services, such as hiring translators with the lowest bids or those promising the earliest delivery, and who exhibit scarcely any accreditations to exercise the profession, something that can lead to scams or to the delivery of poorly translated projects. Likewise, a lack of knowledge about the proceedings involved in translation activity can generate specific conflicts between clients’ expectations and the daily reality of the professional, as is usually the case with deadlines. There is no doubt that one of the top priorities of both translation agencies and freelance professionals is fully meeting the client’s needs regarding delivery times, meaning they will endeavor to deliver the project on time to the best of their ability. Nevertheless, clients will occasionally request delivery times considering that the project will be started immediately, but the reality is that a new task must be integrated into an organizing schedule with ongoing projects for each translator. Therefore, it is essential that clients learn to distinguish between an urgent project and a project to be delivered as soon as possible. Our article Tips for streamlining processes in urgent assignments delves into this issue in more detail, also proposing specific solutions.
Among the most discussed aspects in the language services industry is the degree of involvement of professional translators in the process of product localization. It is well-known that in the day-to-day of the translation industry, translators bump into a myriad of materials that must be adapted, localized or translated into a target language, and which sometimes raise doubts about their true meaning, already obscured in the source copy, or inaccuracies and typos are detected that jeopardize the quality of the starting material. What should be done in those cases? Should we just report these errors? Are we supposed to reproduce them? Or shall we bypass the source copy altogether and reformulate the target copy with some degree of freedom? Translator’s intervention in these cases is up for debate.
The truth is that oftentimes we encounter source materials with inaccuracies, which lead us to question the approach to follow during the translation process. A fairly common case is that of spelling and typographical syntax errors in the source. These errors can be spelling errors (if there are errors in a word, missing accents, mistaken letters, etc.), grammatical errors (if sentences are not properly organized, or there are concordance mistakes with respect to the grammatical gender or number, etc.) or punctuation errors (if there is inconsistency in the use of a mark, if sentences are not correctly punctuated leading to reading misunderstandings, if symbols are confused, etc.) Obviously, the translation delivered by the professional must not contain any of these errors, meaning that, when they are spotted in the source text, they are usually corrected in the translated version so as to hand in a grammatically correct translation. Nevertheless, in certain cases and especially in certain types of text, clients request that errors in the source material be kept so that they are reproduced with the utmost accuracy, as is the case with intellectual property. However, clients usually appreciate being notified of these kinds of errors by means of a note, so that they can improve the quality of the source material and avoid submitting an incorrect version, which could negatively affect their business activity. With this example, it is clear that the translator has a certain power to make annotations on the source texts and propose changes that will improve their quality. However, how far does this scope of action go?
Translators can do their part as linguistic experts, and on occasion, as they work in the translation directly collating the source text, they can detect minute errors such as inconsistency in the use of certain terms, thereby being able to advise a unification of the terminology to make it easier to read and understand. Likewise, the translator’s involvement in the general writing style can be highlighted. As a language specialist, the translator’s profile is generally more sensitive in their analysis of writing styles than authors of generalist or specialist texts. We could ask ourselves about the possibility of having the translator make stylistic suggestions about the source text, but this might imply overstepping the client’s own creative role, so it is not common to modify large text segments following a translator’s advice. However, this does not prevent the translator from offering a more carefully crafted version in their translation to convey information in a clearer, more attractive manner, thus improving the overall quality of the product.
Summing up, the translator’s involvement in source materials is limited to formal criteria, such as grammatical requirements, and it is typically circumscribed by this. Nevertheless, when the translator considers the source text to be unclear or have stylistic issues, they will be able to provide an adaptation in the translated version, although this will depend on the type of text at hand.
