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Excerpts from my article “A Georgia Peach Was the Apple of My Eye”, published in the summer 2005 issue of the “Slav File”, a publication of the Slavic Division of ATA:
“I am still able to treat the translating process as an intellectual adventure, as a challenge for the brain and the resources that are stored there. Translators are multilingual people even if they work only with two languages, because each specialty within a given language is like a different language. A regular native speaker of English will have a problem understanding legalese, any scientific jargon, medical jargon, language of the financial reports, or any gobbledygook. Most of the time, a translator has to learn on the job, because there is always something new, something challenging”.
“Full awareness of the context and its understanding is probably the single most important element of a good translation”.
“It is my observation that some colleagues tend to explain meaning of some words instead of translating them. I think that whenever the reader of the translated text will understand it and when it will not sound awkward in Polish some idiomatic expressions should be translated verbatim”.
“American English can be wonderfully creative and informal. Sometimes idiomatic expressions are created ad hoc, and memos could be full of colorful expressions relating to culture, history, politics, and everyday life. Getting this somehow into the translations is to give the reader a better taste of American culture, possibly teaching him or her something new”.
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