Learnings from French Translation Course
Being an aspiring translator, I always have been wanting to study the art of translation. Though I plan to study it in detail while I do my master’s in translation. I always wanted to try it before I jump into it two years later. So I did a course at Alliance Française de Delhi to get my head start. The course taught literary and pragmatic translation among all the other types out there like commercial, technical, judicial, administrative, medical, financial.
Techniques of French Translation
The Pragmatic Way
The pragmatic translation covers the area of all kinds of official documents that we usually require, like birth certificates, degrees, and marriage certificates. The only challenge here is finding the right equivalents and sticking to the jargon that one must develop according to the nature of the document. Once the jargon is developed, it is more like having a stencil and using it on every other document. For instance, every birth certificate will require you to use the same set of words as the one before.
The Deep Dive
On the other hand, literary translation, as the name suggests, is the translation of literary works, like novels, poems, and dramas. There is not even remotely a stencil situation in this case. Each piece of work is unique because each one who writes is different from the others. Due to this kind of subjectivity, literary translation is one of the more difficult kinds of translation. One must not only translate the words but try to transfer the emotions, the humor, the cultural references, the style of writing, and the figures of speech.
Upgrade to My Skills
The course, through its 56 sessions stimulated my thinking in so many ways, enhanced my research skills, my analytical skills, my writing skills, my vocabulary, and countless other skills. Besides, it also may have given me more clarity as to what domain to choose as a translator. I just knew the moment I started gluing myself to my laptop until I finish a literary translation assignment, that this is it.
Literary translation it is!
I might like things organized but I would never be able to enjoy translating with stencils, I would rather use up all my creative juices, and go through random writer’s block than have zero work of creativity in my work.
Well, I absolutely loved the course and found it to be a much-needed learning experience.
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