Poll: Would you recommend your university to study translation?

Mario Freitas wrote:



In my case, in Business Admin and Accounting.

It has been exhaustively proven that a degree in translation is just one of the means to become a good translator, perhaps not even the best one. We had several quick polls discussing this issue, and several experienced translators have a degree in their area of specialization, not in translation. The best translators I know fit into this category, and many translators I never want to work with again are translation program graduates.

But this question will appear again in a few weeks, as usual, with a new format.

The Misha wrote:

that one needs or even wants to study translation. And, as a great American man of letters put it, assume makes you know what of you and me. Ahem... study what? You mean, in the classroom? For four years? Gimme a break. This is like saying you need four years of college to study pot making (no, not THAT kind of pot:) but the analogy works even better in that other sense).

I will never tire of saying that ours is first and foremost a craft (occasionally rising to the level of art, but that's immaterial for the purpose of this discussion), and you learn a craft by DOING. To be sure, you need to be comfortable enough with the tools - which are the languages, in our case, and that's what you do need to study. The rest is but a skill gradually developed in the process of practicing the craft, preferably, under adult supervision. To be sure, there are a few tricks here and there, but all of those can be easily grasped in passing by anyone who is comfortable with the tools and is not a complete moron.

Eons ago, back in my university days in a provincial town in the country of my birth, we were taught the language, not translation - which in itself was almost a four-letter word. Translation was only taught (or so we heard) at a very limited number of elite diplomatic or military institutions reserved almost entirely for the children and proteges of the then government nomenclatura. So there's no wonder that most translators currently operating in my primary pair (of whom the predominant majority are native Russian speakers, regardless of what the book says), except, possibly, for the youngest generation that has already caught this European "translation studies" bug, never studied translation. Heck, some of the best translators I know (especially former engineers and such) never even studied their languages formally. Yet, this doesn't seem to have stopped them or put them at any disadvantage whatsoever.