THE TRANSLATOR’S COMPETENCE

Linguistic competence: it means that the professional must translate in his/her mother tongue. Only in this way it is possible to guarantee that a translated text is as fluent as the original one. In fact, the translation process must respect not only the accuracy and precision of the contents, but also the appropriateness of form and style.

These characteristics vary from one linguistic system to another and, sometimes, can depend on subtle shades of meaning that can be perceived only by those people who speak and write in that language since they were born and have high-degree qualifications.

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Technical competence: it means that the translator must understand what he/she is reading and that he/she makes a conscious choice of the equivalent in the target language. To translate does NOT mean looking for a word into a dictionary and placing it in the target text. Often, in fact, a word has different meanings, or shades of meanings, depending on the texts.

The translation supposes the understanding of the contents of the text and their linguistic adaption to the system of the target language. Without that understanding, the result would be a literal “translation” with hilarious and obvious mistakes in the best case, and an ambiguous one in the worst. Hence the need to contact qualified translators.