During my work experience at Aktuel Translations, I had the opportunity to translate two children’s books into English, one from French and one from German, and I quickly found them to be far more challenging than they looked. At first, the books looked quite simple: they only had short bits of text with lots of pictures and speech bubbles. But once I started, there was a few things I found difficult.
The first issue I had was vocabulary. Both books focused on topics I had never studied before. The French book was about wild horses so I had to deal with a lot of equestrian terms I had never seen before, and the German book was about orcas, which meant not only whale-related vocabulary, but also words around boats, the sea and other marine life. This meant I spent quite a lot of time looking up words! I was also quite surprised that this level of language appeared in books aimed at young children, and it really showed me that while you are told you are at a reading age for a foreign language you are learning, you lack areas of vocabulary which children learning it as their first language, pick up in daily life.
I also struggled with the style of language. At school most of the French and German I’ve learned is quite formal, with exact grammatical structures, especially German! However the books often used more casual or slang language which people would use every day, but I have never experienced or more playful sentences. For example, in the German comic book there was quite a lot of onomatopoeic words which don’t have the literal meaning which I looked up in the dictionary, and I had to work out what whole sentence or phrase meant and then think of a word which would fit while keeping the meaning. In the German comic book the word ‘klatschen’ which means ‘to clap or applaud’ was used to describe how the whales dove back into the sea after jumping out. However ‘clap’ was a very literal translation and didn’t really sound right, so I needed to find a word which would fit better in the passage. I decided to use ‘splash’ as I thought that it best fit the idea of a whale landing back in the sea, and I was definitely helped by the pictures next to the passage of the whale hitting the water.
Another challenge I found was being too literal. With other kinds of translation, especially the type of questions I do in school, being very exact with the translation isn’t a problem or it is even encouraged. However, in translating a children’s book, a sentence which is simple and clear in French or German, might feel clunky or confusing if translated word-for-word into English. I often had to work out the meaning of a sentence then change it into natural English, often with different words or structure. This was a new experience for me because it meant trusting my judgement rather than sticking rigidly to the original phrasing.
Tense was another area where I struggled at first. Most of the books were written in the present tense, which I replicated in my translation. However, this often resulted in unclear sentences as the characters were doing one thing after another all in the present tense, and when I looked at a previous translation which had been done by a professional translator, a lot of the translation was in the past tense which is much more natural in children’s books in English.
One other thing I struggled with while translating these books was actually the length. They hadn’t seemed particularly long books at first, but when I actually started to translate them, they took far longer than expected. They were easily the longest translations I had ever done, so it was a new experience. It also showed me how slow I am at translating!
As well as these translations, during my work experience, I also got to experience some proof reading, project management and a brief look into the legal side of translations, which all gave me a really good insight into what it is like to work at a translation company.
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