Spanish Translation Blog

Translating = Thinking

I found this nice little comic strip at Mox’s blog, a site put up by a fellow translator.

I liked it because I feel like, to at least some extent, it shows what we translators go through at some point. When we are up to our eyes with work, an upcoming interview, when we can’t sleep and we have next to no contact with the outside world (not even through TV!), we’re in cruise control and can’t help but translate whatever we’re thinking. In other words, thinking itself has become a synonym for translating. We translate everything, out loud or in our heads, for ourselves and for others. Or we’ll speak in another language without realizing it or considering that Aunt So and S o doesn’t know the language and the dog doesn’t understand sentáte. But that doesn’t translate to what we think about life and death or what we’re planning to do next weekend.

As you can see, this post is not an attempt to solve anything. It’s just a reflection. We’ve made a few suggestions before about how to beat the exhaustion and stress when you’re in the middle of an important delivery (take a walk, eat an apple, call a friend on the phone). Exhaustion can lead to errors… For all the “craziness” that comes from too much translating… I don’t think there’s much we can do.