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Translating is Art

Most translators would agree that translating something written from one language into another is a form of art. When I spend too much time managing the business I miss the hours I get to spend sometimes translating a document from English into Spanish for a client … it’s one of my only outlets to be truly creative (even if it’s in a more technical sense). What a translator does is “convert” a  picture in one language and “paint” it with words into another language. Since you and I mostly think in pictures… proof? What do you think of when I say “dog”? That’s literally what we are doing, painting a  picture in another language. This takes creativity and imagination, you  have to put yourself in the place of a person living in the target  country and ask yourself “how would someone in Chile say this?” The key is to make sure it sounds very natural and not literal. A literal translation is easy to spot and easier to do than a truly good translation which takes creativity.