by Luis E. Bastias

Created on: March 20, 2008   Last Updated: May 20, 2008

Keyword: "education translation"

I was once asked to lead the translation of an educational website. The translation of the whole set included articles, book reviews, case studies, and tests. Here I share some of the reflections I made after that call.

- Culture.

Usually, a translator pays scarce attention to the reader's culture, because there is no pedagogical effort along with the translation itself. In other words, the reader is supposed to handle the cultural clues the original text makes use of. You suppose the reader's culture will be similar to the author's, and that the ideas the original puts forward are applicable to other contexts and in other places. The situation is quite different in education, because the final purpose is not to provide a literal translation but rather to teach something. An education driven translation will have to consider that fact, and for instance the translated version will have to explain certain details that the average reader might ignore, even if that knowledge is widely spread in the author's culture. On the contrary, sometimes the translator can skip details the reader already knows.

- Accuracy and Terminology.

An error that, in general translation, would be safe or harmless, in education, could be risky. For instance, consider the translation of large numbers to Spanish. There is a natural tendency to translate a billion as a billn and a trillion as a trilln; however, the word billion usually stands for what in Spanish would be one thousand millions. To translate a billion as a billn is a mistake that in a sci-fi novel will not have any consequences, but it is undesired in education.

In some cases, the culture also allows to pass over the translation of certain technical terms. The term "by pass", as applied in surgery, for instance, is used in English in most languages. The same happens with "know how" in management, and with "e-mail". Although most readers will also understand a literal translation of those technical terms, when the final purpose is educational, the ideal would be to teach the real term people actually use. In addition, when translating tests and questionnaires, there should be consistency between the delivered contents and the questions aimed to test that knowledge. If we adopted one terminology for the first, we should use the same set for the second.

- Readability.

It is not the same to write a book for children than to deliver the same contents to an adult, because in the first case the translator should avoid complex words, for instance. There are even some metrics used to measure the readability of a text, as the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, that estimates the lowest educational level recommended for the reader. For instance, an article with a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of eight will be suitable for a reader that already passed eight grade. The problem is, of course, there is no assurance that a literal translation of a - let us say - 8th grade English text will be also suitable for 8th grade. On the contrary, a literal translation will have most probably a very different readability level in the target language. In other words, to keep the readability level similar to the original, the translator has to make an extra effort.

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