Words or ideas?

Kevin Hendzel, award-winning translator, linguist, author, media consultant, and translation expert, unravels this myth of the translator who is the person who speaks languages very clearly in this blog post.

(…) So translators do not translate languages or words. They translate ideas.

And in today’s commercial translation market, that means we translate the ideas of people who are deeply invested in some highly complicated activities and are willing to pay us to convey them.

Since we must understand those ideas to do this accurately, we must know not only what we know, but we must also know what they know, too.(…)