Introduction

As an educator, author, translator, and language access leader, I often find myself sharing what it takes to become an effective, efficient, and responsible translator because I run into too many people of all backgrounds and experiences who think that because a person speaks more than one language, they can translate anything and everything under any circumstances and at any time of day. Many of these people also think that by just changing the language button or flipping the language switch on a machine translation application or website, they’ll receive an effective translation that they can readily share with the world.

Many of these people have the best intentions. They want to provide written documents in more languages so that more people can understand their content. However, they’ve most likely never had the ample opportunity to hear translators speak about their work, to learn what a responsible translation process looks like, and to build their translation literacy. It’s not really their fault. It’s just that there aren’t too many places to find this information and to hear about these experiences. And because language, for most, comes across as being easy to produce, it doesn’t occur to most people that moving what’s said in one language into another would be challenging. Many people think that moving something from one to the other should be just as simple as the initial production of language.

At the same time, at least in the context of the United States, there’s little knowledge about the benefits of studying languages, literatures, and cultures. Most k–12 schools don’t offer languages other than English until an advanced grade. Universities are eliminating language requirements and doing away with language professors and programs. Ironically, universities and beyond are expressing a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging efforts. That can’t happen if the language needs and linguistic diversity of local communities and the world are overlooked.

In this context then, people aren’t aware of the range of advantages that their language skills can have for them as they build and transform their careers. They might have an idea that they can be a language teacher, an interpreter, or a translator, but they might not know that they can be project managers at a translation agency or even establish and grow their own language companies that provide language services to the world. It’s seldomly talked about at the general level that the language industry is one of the wealthiest and fastest growing in the world.

The lack of promotion of this information doesn’t incentivize the learning and continued learning of languages or even confidence in the fact that speaking multiple languages has value. What’s more, it helps to make the larger language companies even larger and limits the opportunities for new ventures.

Another part of the picture is that as people continue to be displaced by natural and human-provoked disasters, language access needs are growing and becoming more formalized through certain legalities and commitments by organizations of several types. Therefore, the provision of translation services is growing. Additionally, other more voluntary or strategic efforts of globalization call for translation and localization.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) also contributes to this picture. On the one hand, some AI can make translation seem as though it’s easy, fast, and cheap. You usually get a translation produced by AI when you click on the Translate button or your browser automatically offers you a translation without your asking for it. There’s a lot to know about AI and language production. To start, you need to keep two things in mind. First, these translations aren’t reliable and should be checked by a qualified translator before being distributed. This is especially true if it’s a high-stakes situation. Next, AI-generated translations don’t have the same quality for every language. Because some Spanish translations that AI generates might not be that bad (although a qualified translator always needs to check them), this doesn’t mean all translations are of the same quality for all languages. AI is better at some language pairs than it is others. And without getting too into the weeds, users of AI-generated translations need to be aware of the biases contained in these translations. Thus, some of the work that humans have worked hard to accomplish can be reversed in AI-generated translations. Overall, AI has the potential to get some poor language use into circulation. Although this is harmful for all languages, it’s especially harmful to those that don’t have as widespread circulation as others or that don’t have as many resources, including qualified translators.

A final thing I’d like to bring awareness to as you read this book is the disappearance of languages. The world is made up of a little over 7,000 human languages. Not all of them are written, and more than half may disappear over the next century. As Victor D. O. Santos shares in his book What Makes Us Human, “when one of them disappears, a culture may also disappear. A unique way to view and understand the world.” Translators can help prevent languages from disappearing. When people move around the world, they bring their languages with them. If their new location is committed to giving them access to information in their preferred language, until they no longer need it — because they’ve sufficiently learned the main language of the receiving culture — that effort keeps languages in circulation. Not only that, the translations make the languages visible, which is key for representation, inclusion, and awareness efforts.

I provide all this context to make it clear that translation is about so much more than just words and that the work of a translator, regardless of how many tools are at their disposal, is in need and must be done in a responsible manner to provide equitable opportunities and to prevent languages from disappearing, among other things.

I don’t tell you how to translate in this book. Yet, I do spell out a process for translation. Rather, the focus is on the becoming: how to get there, and the potential wrapped up in the required skills. This book is more about the mindset than the how-to. If you rush to the how-to without establishing the mindset, the path to becoming a translator will be rocky and the results will be unstable. Mindset is the foundation to becoming a translator. Then you can add tools, areas of specialization, services, marketing efforts, clients, and more. And I do touch on all those things. What I share in this book will get you to the starting line of being a translator.

With that perspective in mind, this book is for many different audiences. It is for those who want to become translators and for those who love a person who wants to become a translator. It’s for those who want to support translators in their workplace and beyond and for those who want to encourage someone already within their organization to become a translator. It can also be for those people who are interested in learning more about how human translators work.

About This Book

If you’re curious about becoming a translator, you’re a bilingual person who’s regularly asked to translate in the workplace, or you’re interested in learning more about translators, you’ve come to the right book.

Many of the examples in this book are from the Spanish-speaking world. That’s because I speak Spanish and have carried out most of my professional life until now in the United States where Spanish is widely spoken and translated into. If you work with languages other than Spanish, don’t dismiss the examples. I encourage you to think about the translation problem in the example and ask yourself if you might envision a similar problem in your language pair or pairs. As you grow as a translator, you’ll find that you need to work with translators of language pairs other than your own to find translation solutions. Translators don’t limit themselves to colleagues who work within the same languages. Translation itself is like a language.

This book offers something for different audiences. Check out the table of contents and start wherever you’d like. However, if you’re a beginner, it’s recommended that you make your way through the book from start to finish. Regardless of how you’re reading this book, mark the pages you think you’ll need to come back to in the future. Some of the information you might not need when you read it, but you can refer back to it later when you do.

Part 1 covers what translation is all about. If you can’t think about translation and what it is all about, it’s more difficult to translate. That said, I want you as a reader to get a foundation in defining translation, noting where it already exists in your daily life, breaking away from the common misconceptions about translation, and learning a few key translation terms. Part 1 then gets into recognizing the importance of human translators and the translations they produce, covering both the access to information that translators provide in addition to the more macrolevel contributions that translators and translations make for everyone. The intention is to make you aware that, as a translator, you spend a notable amount of time and energy advocating for the work and pushing for greater translation...