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Being good at speaking a language is completely different from being good at doing translations. Translating requires other special skills besides speaking a language. A translator facesmany issues including culture, grammar, wordsand style.

Here is how to deal with translation’s issues.

Starting with the factor of culture, which many translators may face, how can we deal with it? Let us take an example:

When Coca-Cola launched its fizzy drink in China in 1927, it found out that some local shopkeepers had produced homemade signs using Chinese characters to replicate the sound of the words “Coca-Cola”, without noticing that the characters in combination could be read as “female horse fastened with wax” or “bite the wax tadpole”, according to researchers from Coca-Cola. Coke tweaked the characters so they had an additional meaning: “to permit the mouth to be able to rejoice.”

Another example involves IKEA. Some of IKEA’s product names make its customers blush in Thailand. For example, the “Redalen” bed sounds like Thai slang for “getting to third base”, whilst the “jatterbra” plant pot is a rather crude sexual word in Thai. As Thais can be quite conservative, IKEA has been forced to hire a team of local linguists to help them avoid committing any more translation faux pas.

So a translator should be aware of the target culture so that they can avoid those issues. Another factor that translators have to deal with is grammar. Every language is different, thus they often have different grammar rules and a translator should search and educate themselves with grammar rules and conditions on how to do a proper translation.

Word: this is the easiest issue that a translator may face while translating, they may not have a good knowledge or experience in the field they are translating. In this case, they can search for glossaries to help them with new words and terminologies.

Style: Every language has its own style, for example, the Arabic language always starts with a verb, which is different from English and French, so a linguist should be aware of this by searching and studying every language style.

Finally, translation is a very good operation, which helps a lot, but not everyone who knows the language can translate it. Translation is an art that requires a process of learning.