4 Must-Have Books For Translators

 

For translators or those who want to become translators out there, below are 4 important books that you can buy and read to broaden your horizon and enrich your skills.  You can find the list and below its description copied from the bookstore’s site. Happy Reading

1.The Translator Training Text book by Adriana Tassini
http://translationcertification.org/required-reading/

The Translator Training Textbook by Adriana Tassini is the only required reading for the Certified Translation Professional (CTP) Program. This book supplements the 50 instructional video modules and 10 expert audio interviews that you get as a member within the CTP designation program.  This book is 315 pages long and contains information on translation fundamentals, industry best practices, ethics, frequently asked questions, career advice, and strategies for building your own translation business.

The book is currently available in paperback, audio book, and PDF. The paperback version costs $69.99 and the audio book and PDF versions costs $49.99 each. If you would like to purchase the audio book and PDF versions together that package costs $67.99.

If you wish to buy the paperback version through an Amazon.com owned online bookstore called CreateSpace please click here or order through Amazon.com directly by clicking here. The PDF version may be purchased using the form.

2.Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Translation-Matters-Series/dp/0300171307

Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.”

For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: “Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.”

Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman’s belief in the crucial significance of the translator’s work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.

3. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation by Umberto Eco
http://www.amazon.com/Mouse-Rat-Translation-as-Negotiation/dp/0753817985

From the world-famous author of THE NAME OF THE ROSE, an illuminating and humorous study on the pleasures and pitfalls of translation. ‘Translation is always a shift, not between two languages but between two cultures. A translator must take into account rules that are not strictly linguistic but, broadly speaking, cultural.’ Umberto Eco is of the world’s most brilliant and entertaining writers on literature and language. In this accessible and dazzling study, he turns his eye on the subject of translations and the problems the differences between cultures can cause. The book is full of little gems about mistranslations and misunderstandings.For example when you put ‘Studies in the logic of Charles Sanders Peirce’ through an internet translation machine, it becomes ‘Studies in the logic of the Charles of sandpaper grinding machines Peirce’. In Italian ‘ratto’ has no connotation of ‘contemptible person’ but denotes speed (‘you dirty rat’ could take on a whole new meaning!) What could be a weighty subject is never dull, fired by Eco’s immense wit and erudition, providing an entertaining read that illuminates the process of negotiation that all translators must make.

4.Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything by David Bellos
http://www.amazon.com/That-Fish-Your-Ear-Translation/dp/0865478767

People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors’ languages―as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn’t even be able to put together flat-pack furniture.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What’s the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What’s the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why?

But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we’ve understood what anybody else says―in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.

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Hikmat Gumilar is a professional English to Indonesian Translator and Indonesian Interpreter domiciled in Jakarta Indoensia. Contact Hikmat at penerjemah@penerjemah-id.com if you require the service in this pair.