alexpgp | 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...