Translation not only requires a thorough knowledge of both the original language and the language to be translated into, but also a clear understanding of the context of the document requiring translation, and nuances between languages, since a literal translation will not be accurate.
Here are some common differences and challenges that translators need to bear in mind when translating between Spanish and English:
1. Capitalisation and punctuation
Spanish often doesn’t use capital letters where English does, for example, with days of the week, months or seasons, and with languages and nationalities.
Furthermore, when writing numbers, Spanish uses a decimal point to separate the thousands (e.g., 13.500.725), whereas English uses a comma (e.g., 13,500,725).
Although these are small differences and the general meaning of the translation will still be conveyed if these rules are not followed, the translation will look unprofessional because it will be technically inaccurate.
2. False friends
Thankfully, in the above examples of capitalisation or punctuation these mistakes rarely result in misunderstandings, but this is not the case with ‘false friends’. In linguistics, false friends are words in different languages that look similar but differ significantly in their meaning. If an English speaker saw the Spanish word ‘título’, they might assume that the meaning would be ‘title’; this is a correct translation but in many contexts this word can also mean ‘degree’ or ‘qualification’, such as in the case of a diploma. Furthermore, the English word ‘commodity’ might look like the Spanish word ‘comodidad’, but commodity means ‘a product that can be traded, bought, or sold’, whereas ‘comodidad’ means ‘comfort or convenience.’ In a translation of a business agreement a lack of awareness of this false friend would result in a strange deal!
There are many more examples we could look at that also show how an incorrect translation of a ‘false friend’ results in an inaccurate translation.
3.Language style
Spanish is often wordier and more formal than English is. Spanish documents often use more words to describe something than English documents do. For example, a 300-word document will typically be 350-400 words in Spanish.[1] In other words a Spanish text is about 20% longer than an equivalent English text. This is because Spanish is often more detailed and expressive and sometimes uses more words to describe something that English would probably sum up in just one word. For this reason, a literal translation will often result in a document that might sound strange in English due to the repetition of words and ideas.
4. Language variation
There are variations between different forms of English and Spanish spoken around the world, resulting in differences in vocabulary. For example, one common financial term is ‘current account’ in British English, but ‘checking account’ in American English. Therefore, translators should be aware of the contexts in which they are translating from and to.
These challenges require qualified translators to produce a faithful version of the text and are just a few examples of why using a machine translator often produces errors, because machines are unable to accurately translate within context, but rather provide a literal translation.