For the translation part of my project, I stuck relatively close to the source text. I did not want to change a lot of it because it was mostly facts and by changing the information, I felt that the facts would get lost. I also found it hard to stick rigidly to the source text because I was making it too personal in English, when in fact, in Spanish it was not that personal or emotional. For example, in the Spanish paper translated to English, the sentence states “Nahomí Galindo’s life has been taken” but I wanted to say “Nahomí Galindo’s life has been tragically taken”. Another example is “the motivation behind this murder”, I wanted to add the adjective “sad” – “the sad reason for this motivated murder”. I found this was my problem throughout the translation process. I think that another reason why I stuck closely to the original text was because it is factual and not literary. If I was translating a literary text I think there would have been more opportunity for me to change the sentence while keeping the same message. There might have been idiomatic sentences or phrases that would not be able to translate in the other language and so I would have had to do some research to find if there was a phrase with the same meaning in the target language.
While translating, I used a variety of different techniques and approaches to translate the papers. I started off by quickly reading the text to get an idea of what the papers were talking about. Then I answered questions like “who is the text for?”, “who is the target audience” and “what is the function of my translation”. Following this, I went back through the three articles and with a highlighter, I highlighted areas of the text that I found problematic. Whether it was words that I did not know, the use of different past tenses, subjunctive, grammatical structures, or even “false friends”. I then went back over the text and did a rough translation, leaving gaps for words or phrases that I did not understand or that I found difficult. When I had finished this stage, I went back through my translation and spent time on thinking about the gaps that I had left. I tried to figure out the problem and correct it as best as I could. When I had all my gaps corrected, I finally went back and reread the text as a whole, and where there were any issues or problems, I solved them.
