Name : RIYANDI DARMAWAN

NIM : 13020117130057

Becoming A Translator (An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of

Translation) By Douglas Robinson

This book is created by Douglas Robinson among other works he has such as Western
Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsch, Performative Linguistics, and The
Translator’s Turn. He is a Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, USA. This
book was firstly published in 1997 by Routledge then reprinted 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,
2002. While the second edition was published in 2003 by Routledge. This Robinson’s book
gives the readers useful and benificial information in term of theory and practice of
translation. The beginner practising translators are helped how to translate accurately and
quickly, overcome the potential problem related to translation even the strees and the market
it works.
The first chapter provides an introduction about the classification of two different
perspectives in translation. They are internal ( from the translator’s point of view ) and
external knowledge (the translation is perceived from the outside whether client’s or other
user’s point of view –non translators).The internal knowledge, A translator thinks and talks
about translation from inside the process so the activity is the most important. However, the
non-traslators concern with primarily the text produced by the action/activity done by the
translators under the heading of reliability -usersof translation ought to be able to rely on
translation(divided into textual and and translator’s reliability), timeliness (least flexible
when the translation is tied to a specific dated use situation), cost (it controls virtually all
translation), and trade-offs (finding the resultant of the above-mentioned factors maximally
favourable for the parties involved). Types of text reliability are literalism,
foreignism,fluency, summary, commentary, summary-commentary, adaptation, encryption.
While the translator reliability regarding to the text: attention to detail, sensitivity to the
user’s need, research, checking, regarding to the client: versatility, promises, friendliness,
confidentiality, and regarding to technology: hardware and software.
Chapter 1 explains what the translator needs to understand systematically including
the examples of the case so it is easy to understand. Something great from this book is that
the book is also offering interesting discussion, suggestion for further reading, and exercise in
the field of translation that the readers could try either for beginner or advanced translators.
In chapter 2, the book deepens more about the translators view/perspective. They need
to really consider what the users need, integrate it for translation work as translator-oriented
perspective, the reliability the users demand for profesional pride (the areas in and through
which translators typically take professional pride are reliability, involvement in the
profession, and ethics). It is all about the observation, characteristic, factors involved in
translators work field such as income (related to speed, translation memory software, project
management, raising the status of profession) and enjoyment in running the work of
translating that has a big role in translation. The realibility in professional pride is one matter
the users need so it is the main reason we will spend hours hunting down a single term.
Involvement in the profession is a very important for translators in term of translator
associations, conferences, courses we take in the field, how we network with other translators
in our region and language pair. Ethic in here means unethical for the translator to distort the
meaning of the source text. Of course translators translate the work for money, that is called
income. The faster a freelancer translates, the more money s/he makes influenced by typing
speed, the level of text difficulty, familiarity with this sort of text, translation memory
software, personal preferences or style, job stress, general mental state. Translation memory
software like TRADOS Translation Workbench, Atril’s DéjaVu, IBM Translation Manager,
Star Transit, and SDLX are all fairly expensive, and mainly useful with very repetitive
translation tasks, such as a series of user’s manuals from the same client, so their most
spectacular application has been in the translation divisions of large corporations (“in-house”
translating) to increase translation speed of freelance translators’. Project management is
creating our own agency as effective way to improve income. Raising the status of the
profession is raising the general awareness of translation and its importance to society
outcomes done by the translator associations and unions, translator training programs, and
translation scholars in order to raise translator income. Pleasure in the work will motivate a
mediocre translator to enhance her or his reliability and speed; boredom or distaste in the
work will make even a highly competent translator sloppy and unreliable. Therefore
enjoyment is significant.
What we can conclude from the book this chapter are translation is more about people
than about words, more about the jobs people do and the way they see their world than it is
about registers or sign systems, more about the creative imagination than it is about rule-
governed text analysis. The translator is more like an actor or a musician (a performer) than
like a tape recorder even of highly technical texts, is more like a poet or a novelist than like a
machine translation system.
This book would become a proper guidance for translators to know clients’
expectations to have their texts translated reliably, rapidly and cheaply based on chapter 1
and understand that professional pride, income and enjoyment of one’s work are three
internal requirements for translators view as what are stated in chapter 2.