If you think writing is hard, try your hand at translation. It will be an eye-opener, promised. Among the extremely hard to do, translating websites, novels, and poems are the leaders, with poems winning the contest by lengths. A badly translated book is doomed to failure, as is a badly translated website. Worse, a bad translation can come back to haunt you in the original language. If you need translations, leave it to the professionals and don't dabble.
Translating is an art as much as the original writing was. We all know the guys and girls out there that publish by Google Translate. It is simply painful. But even reworked, these translations can be awful, misguiding or misguided, and just plain and simply wrong. And they can be wrong in several ways. Wrong, in the sense of missing the meaning of the author. Wrong, in getting the nuances out of a fictional character in a book. Wrong, to attract people to a website because German or French search terms might deviate considerably from English ones.
Translating another author's book is laborious work. First, you need to read and understand the book to get the full story. The full story will influence style and language of the translation. It will also keep the translator from inadvertently giving something away by choosing one of several possible terms in any given sentence. Having read the full story, the translator also has to understand the story, and what its author is aiming at. Without that, Google Translate would do just as well. After that, it is just hard graft, and keeping the flow of the original. If you know anyone who does translations of books, admire them, they are great artists.
The hardest to do is translating poetry. The translator has to be a poet, otherwise it's a doomed undertaking. Understanding poetry is hard enough at times, explaining it to others in a way they can understand is even harder. Try to understand it and then translate it in a way that others understand it in the way it was intended to be understood. That is the hardest job in the world. Never underestimate a poet.
Website translations are difficult in a completely different way. While the content is usually easy enough to understand, defining the aims of the website is the real problem. Website owners and webmasters are struggling with that, too. To get a website translated properly, its aims and its intended readers or users have to be clearly defined. Without that, any translation will fail for lack of primary information, as keywords in the new language can't be properly defined and no texts crafted according to them.
Translating your own texts is obviously the easiest thing to do, if you are fluent in the language you are translating into. In all other cases, it is advisable to turn to professional translators.
Historically, Shakespeare defined English the way we speak it today. We use hundreds of his sayings without thinking about the bard. The German translator who tackled his works in the 19th century was a genius; his translation influenced German as much as the Bard's original, and he gave the German language about as many sayings, too.
How to Use Google Translate
The Google Translate Trap
Language Barriers
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