7 Challenges of Translating Romantic Content
By: Admin Posted on Wed, 09-03-2022
The requirement for the translation of romantic books and content is rising these days. It has been much in demand lately, and publishing houses are hiring translators for the task. The translation is a process that deals with the conversion of text from the original language to a target language. The translators have to be well aware of the facts and cultural aspects of the target language to translate the romantic book into the relevant language. Not taking care of glossary, nuances and other cultural factors can offend the target masses which can ultimately ruin the whole effort of the translation.
Fifty shades of Grey, a romantic saga written by E.L James has been a huge success. The book kept on trending for months and soon after its release, there was a cinematic adaptation of the book as well. This book has been translated into more than 30 languages already.
Challenges of Translating the Romantic Content
The translation is itself a challenging and extensive task. However, when it comes to the translation of literary and romantic content, it is quite stimulating and complex. Translators have to take account of many factors before starting the task of translating romantic content. Lately, it is not only the romantic content, which is getting popular because of availability of the online content and e-libraries. People are now more into kindles and other gadgets to read the content in their leisure time. The easy access and availability of romantic content online have also surged the demand for translation. However, the whole process of translation is not an easy task, and it rather involves a lot of effort, challenges, and drawbacks.
A translator has to be competent and wise enough to realize how being a translator is not all about being a bilingual person. It involves a lot more. A translator has to deal with interpreting and transcribing messages that are according to the particular target audience. Besides that, he has to go through linguistic challenges during translation.
A list of challenges has been compiled that translators and language service providers come across during the task of translation.
1. Linguistic Challenges
The use of the right terms, idioms, and linguistic techniques is the beauty of a romantic as well as literary book. All these factors make it interesting and fascinating to read. Translation of romantic content into a whole new language is one big challenge that a translator comes across. Linguistic challenges are really stimulating. They can not go for the literary translation. A word-to-word translation of romantic content actually kills the romance itself. The sentence might change as a whole, and it may lead to situations like false friends. For the un initiative, a false friend is a term that is referred to two words from different languages that may appear the same in their structure and people assume these have the same meaning as well. However, these have different meanings in reality.
Every language has its unique words and expressions. An expression can not be translated as accurately as these are in the original language and in romantic content, expressions do matter a lot.
2. Change in Languages and Dialects
A second challenge that translators have to face during translation is about constant change in languages and their dialects. A romantic book contains different characters, and many of them have different language profiles. There are more than 7000 languages in the world. Each of these languages has a unique region, structure, phonetics, and roots. A translator has to consider the closest dialect if not the exact one so that it is easy for the target readers to understand and relate. Even a single language is spoken in a country with different dialects. Further, there are regional dialects. So, a romantic book has a language with different dialects, and translating the content to a new target language may affect the quality.
3. Cultural Aspects
Culture varies with the regions and countries. Even the same different regions of a single country practice different cultures. Every country has a different culture and methods of communication. They have particular languages, symbols, shorthand, and other factors. These factors could imply different meanings when translated into other languages. Using symbols or other signs without having proper knowledge could offend target masses and this could be something offensive for them. When different cultural backgrounds communicate, the meanings could get different. Therefore, it is quite challenging for the translators as if they don’t interpret it accurately it could lead to serious problems. So, having the know-how of the target audience's culture is a must thing.
4. Familiarity with Target Market’s Preferences
It is of foremost importance that the makers take their translators and carry out research on the target market and their target readers. They should be well aware of the facts that are preferred by the target audiences during books and romantic content selection. The format of translating literary and romantic content also affects the reader’s interest and attention. It gets challenging to follow a particular format during translation, as translating a book or content in bulk volume makes it difficult to formalize things properly.
5. Reserving Original Essence and Context
This is an extremely challenging part of the translation of romantic content. The book that gets popular in its original language needs to carry main factors from the language to the target language. Translation could get mechanical and may lose the fluency and flow. A mechanical word-to-word conversion of content without any fluency is a plain bore thing to read. Reserving the original flow, consistency and context are extremely important to fetch a wider audience and readers. So, translators have to be mindful about the fact of keeping the translation transparent and original for the new masses, which often gets tough at times.
6. Historical Happenings
There are hundreds of romantic novels and books that have historical backdrops and occurred during a particular historic timeline. Today’s world has become quite advanced, and technology has made people short-tempered and impatient. Adding long and unnecessary details of historical happening, wars and events may ruin the fluency and flow for the reader. They might lose the grip and may skip it and look for some other interesting read. So, it is a challenging part to cope with such events in the romantic content. Translators should take that into account and add only relevant and necessary details that don’t bore the readers.
7. Religious References
There are different romantic novels and books that have religion as an important influence. The writers use religious factors to make the plot more interesting and intriguing. Now, this is yet again a tough and challenging part of translation. Translators many times are not well aware of the minute details of the religion that has been mentioned in the book. Moreover, the target audience could be least interested to know the religious factors happening in a romantic book. Hence, it is really challenging for the team of translators to cover the religious part in the best possible manner without ruining the crux of the story.
Final Words
The translation is an extensive task. Be it is about the translation of some official documents or literary and romantic content. It involves a lot of effort and work. Translating romantic content is quite challenging as translators have to take account of certain factors. They have to take care of the original context, cultural and religious aspects with many others. Moreover, a list of the most translated books has also been shared to engage the readers.
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