My pedantic streak exposed...

A participant in the intelingual community asked about the utility of enrolling for a 5-1/2 year translation/interpretation program at Ottawa University (as opposed to a 4-year translation program) and asked some other questions. My response:

Well, the way you describe it, it doesn't take 5-1/2 years... it only takes an extra year and a half.

But that's all a fiction anyway. Unless you apply yourself in the real world during your schooling, you will leave school not much better prepared to be a translator or interpreter than when you started. (That's not a slam against the school; it's the nature of education, at least as I have observed over the past several decades.)

My own experience finds that translation to be "writing for publication," and interpretation to be "public speaking." If one cannot do one or the other, then regardless of one's language proficiency and knowledge of theory, one will not prosper as either translator or interpreter, respectively.

Again based on my experience, I find translation and interpretation reinforce each other. Doing lots of translation gives you an opportunity to exercise the "chunking" and "grokking" parts of your brain, which helps greatly in the interpretation end of the business. Doing interpretation, on the other hand, gives you an opportunity to exercise the "grokking" and "expressing" parts of your brain, which also helps in translation.

Having an LJ is, in my opinion, a valuable adjunct to the above exercises, because it gives you the opportunity to express yourself to a small public group, which ought to give you some incentive to sharpen your expressive skills.

Just my (pedantic) two cents.

I probably should have stuck a smiley-face after the first graf.

Cheers...

Where did the day go?

I got back a little while ago from the kids' place, where I had some barbeque dinner and socialized with Huntur and Clara, Huntur's cousin. And to be utterly frank, I have no desire to do any more translation today.

The day started with my finishing the alignment job I started before the kids left for California, which took a couple of hours. The job was interruped by my going to the store to see if anyone was actually there at 8:15 am (there was, Drew just didn't answer the phone, which could have happened for several reasons), a break that lasted almost an hour by itself.

After lunch, I worked some and again felt the tug of fatigue, and again napped for a couple of hours. There followed another couple of hours of translation (an environmental document, where everyone promises to play nice, an' all...), followed by dinner.

I am yawning like crazy, which makes no sense as today's nap was (like yesterday's) really more of a sleep session. (In fact, I found it difficult to fall asleep last night, since I just was not sleepy.

There goes another yawn. I think I'm going to call it a night and try to catch this wave.

Cheers...