How Do You Translate Slang?
Being a translator let’s you delve into all sorts of territories. You learn a little bit about almost everything you translate. It could be anything from how to build a kite, to what ingredients it takes to make the best chocolate covered strawberries from scratch.
What you also learn a lot about is SLANG. So how does a translator go on about translating something that is written in slang without it getting lost in translation? How do you translate a word for which there is simply no known equivalent in the language you are translating to?
Slang translation is one of the trickiest jobs a translator can face and it’s now more common than it has ever been before. In some cases, the translator, usually someone who is a native of the target language, may not know the meaning of the word herself and will have to do some cultural research just to figure out what it means in the original source language. Urban Dictionary might be a helpful source for the English language, but I doubt every language has a similar resource. Many times words that are “invented” in one language like for example “recycle” will help form the word in another language like “reciclar” in Spanish. Don’t even get me started with the “techy” words like “Twitter,” “Google” or “texting,” for example, all words that have been born in the last decade and have been adopted by other languages. Most of these words started out as slang and have now become household names worldwide, many times spelled the same, only pronounced differently.
The Internet is the place for new language, thanks to blogs, websites and chat forums which let anyone participate, thus ensuring that any hip new words can spread among the masses faster than ever before.