“Study great translations to make great translations” is horrendous advice. Yes, really.
Now that I’ve got your attention (hi!), put your pitchfork down and hear me out. I don’t have a bone to pick with this sacred wisdom, because in and of itself? It ain’t a bad pointer. I give it all the time.
It’s bad advice because it’s more often than not a victim of its context. Because the demographic most likely to hear this advice is the worst demographic for this advice.
Let me explain. Imagine newbies as brand new sponges. Shiny, bouncy, and ready to get to work.
Naturally, they’re able to soak up experiences a lot faster than their more senior peers—because they’re mostly a blank canvas, waiting to be filled.
That’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. Because it also means they’re prone to soaking up all manner of grime and crust.
By studying a translation, they’re effectively soaking up the localization team’s pre-made choices. We had a name for this type of learning: “rote memorization”.
There’s a reason language studies made a hard turn from this approach—rote memorizing canned choices doesn’t make for good, autonomous translators.
It makes for good bilingual scribes.
In effect, a beginner ‘improving’ via studying the translations of their seniors is learning how to replicate the results while:
- Not knowing exactly why most of those choices were made.
- Not knowing if those choices were standard or risky.
- Not knowing if they’re actually worth replicating.
And that’s how you get bilingual gameloc scribes.
A better approach for beginners, imo, would be spending that effort on getting their first gigs, getting exposed to as many editors as humanly possible early on in their careers, building a list of frequent critiques of their translations, and chipping at those until they no longer hear their editors complain about them.
larping translation analysis can always wait until they can tell left from right.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.