It's experiences like what happened on Thanksgiving that make me want to be a translator. A translator works with the written word; an interpreter works on the fly with spoken word. Either would be cool, but anyway, this is what happened:
My uncle was creating a program where you enter in the English equivalent of a doctor's prescription form and it will give you the Spanish equivalent, so that the patient(who I assume wouldn't know very much English) would be able to understand what dosage to take. Seeing as my uncle doesn't know any Spanish, he couldn't really get anywhere, except where google translate will take you(which isn't really far). So it was exciting to be able to help. At first, I gave him the Spanish for entire sentences, but then as he showed me how every part could be broken down, we had to rethink our strategy. In any case, I was able to give him (mostly correct) phrases for each bit. I hope it works out.
But it was really exciting to be able to be part of anything to do with translation. Being able to dig into the puzzle and figure out what words I think would work in that situation was fun. I really think I'd love to be able to do something like that in future. I know that in the translation business, you're really supposed to only translate into your mother tongue, but hey, this was just exercise.
I also once 'translated' a document for a patron at mom's library. It was unfortunately in a language I didn't actually understand, but the whole puzzle aspect made it really fun. And I was able to give him an extremely rough translation of the Bahasa Indonesia document.
Any more takers? Right now, I'm just hankering for some practice. This is my face right now ---> :-D
My uncle was creating a program where you enter in the English equivalent of a doctor's prescription form and it will give you the Spanish equivalent, so that the patient(who I assume wouldn't know very much English) would be able to understand what dosage to take. Seeing as my uncle doesn't know any Spanish, he couldn't really get anywhere, except where google translate will take you(which isn't really far). So it was exciting to be able to help. At first, I gave him the Spanish for entire sentences, but then as he showed me how every part could be broken down, we had to rethink our strategy. In any case, I was able to give him (mostly correct) phrases for each bit. I hope it works out.
But it was really exciting to be able to be part of anything to do with translation. Being able to dig into the puzzle and figure out what words I think would work in that situation was fun. I really think I'd love to be able to do something like that in future. I know that in the translation business, you're really supposed to only translate into your mother tongue, but hey, this was just exercise.
I also once 'translated' a document for a patron at mom's library. It was unfortunately in a language I didn't actually understand, but the whole puzzle aspect made it really fun. And I was able to give him an extremely rough translation of the Bahasa Indonesia document.
Any more takers? Right now, I'm just hankering for some practice. This is my face right now ---> :-D
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