Q. What was the most critical or challenging situation as a translator and how did you manage it?
A. Being a translator, you are supposed to able to handle each and every subject,
from IT to mechanical, from medical to financial. (Or, are we?) The most
challenging thing that I find in professional translation is figuring out� an
exact term for a strange foreign word. Thank goodness, now we have all those
search engines and all those kind-hearted people who publish their stuff
bilingually!
Q. What was the funniest event in your career as a translator?
A. By funny, we have finny-peculiar and funny-haha. To catch both, here is one from
the speller checker. I once translated for a local facility company, from
Chinese into English. By mistake, I typed "public area" as "pubkic area". And
the spell checker in my word processor automatically corrected the typo, by
deleting the "k" in "pubkic". Now see what I got to deliver to the client?
Thanks to the last-minute hardcopy proofreading, I manually corrected all the
instances of this could-have-been-disastrous word! |