| Topic Name: |
Interpreting |
| Message Name: |
Language Materials |
| Date Posted: |
03/08/2006 |
| In Reply To: |
I feel better now :-) |
| Message: |
I recieved three newspaper articles (from major national dailies) in the foreign language and was asked to translate two of the three. One was foreign policy oriented, one was about domestic politics, and the third was about economics. The newspapers in the country where the articles originated from are characteristically very factual and "bland," so the nuances weren't cultural... but rather were those you'd only know if you had practice reading formal (academic or governmental) documents.
If I were a "heritage speaker" and, for example, had grown up speaking the language to one of my parents, I probably would not have been able to make sense of articles since accurate translation required both knowledge of the country's recent history as well as more formal vocabulary.
If my knowledge of the language had been based on informal conversation, it's not that I wouldn't have been able to translate the articles if I had a good dictionary and linguistic intuition. It just would have been that much more difficult.
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