A dear friend of mine is a veteran in the publishing industry in Taiwan. Something she and her colleagues said has stuck with me after all these years:
"There are no bad translators, only lazy ones."
In this day and age, I think that's pretty much 100% true. As far as accuracy is concerned, a translator really has no excuse for getting anything wrong. Whatever we don't know or aren't sure of, we can look it up online and find answers immediately. If you do your research, you will be able to deliver accurate translations.
As for having the translation maintain the style and flavor of the original, that's something one has to work at. And yes, there are some translators who do this better than others. But it's not unattainable. Again, it can be done by anyone willing to put in the hours.
Thomas Edison famously said all his work "boils down to one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." The same holds true for translation. Even the most talented translators have to "work" to translate anything; those words don't translate themselves!
For translators and anyone working in this industry, good time management is especially vital because things often come down to the wire. Failing to plan is planning to fail.
Speaking
of which, it baffles me to see people procrastinate on jobs that
they've never done before. How would anyone know what kind of time
they'd need for something they're doing for the first time? Wouldn't it
be wise to start as soon as possible so we'd have more time for
unforeseeable bumps down the road? It's a simple "the tortoise and the hare" situation, but the inertia is such that we still get too cocky to just "get up and go."
Please translate responsibly.
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