The word "artist" has the meaning of someone who is skilled at what he or she does.
As translators, I feel there is often pressure on us to show that we are at the top of our game, producing the best art of our careers, continually conquering new heights and pushing back the limits to our creativity. Translation, after all, is a creative art, which is incidentally why machine translation is only partly useful, and then again only on certain types of humdrum documents.
I would partly like to refute this focus on the creative side of the job, by breaking translation down into three skillsets:
- Writing. Whatever their field, translators should continually be honing their writing skills. This is perhaps the "arty" side of the job and what makes it fun. Even when translating investment reports day in day out, I can still try to spruce up my writing, even though the subject matter has become very familiar to me over time.
- Linguistic problem-solving. Translation is, at its bare bones, solving problems. From a broad standpoint, this starts as "I have this text in front of me in one language and someone needs it in another". But within the overall process, we adopt strategies for dealing with particular issues between various language pairs, e.g. French to English. Our nous as writers should inform this process so that we won't write monstrous French-sounding English for example.
- Business acumen. A rare quality among translators. This is not solely about making money and running a profitable business; it means that we are fully aware of our place in the client's universe. We take into account what they want and even try to anticipate needs that they have not expressed or may never even express. Business acumen also means having the right procedures in place, like revision (which is why I work as part of a two-person team) and knowing how to approach a translation project.
Consequently, only a small part of what translators do (or ought to do) can be considered as "art".
As a corollary, when we go to meet our clients, do we look like artists or businesspeople?
