For translators: how to stay more competitive?

Have you thought about what happens when you are attempting to translate projects beyond your competence? How to stay more competitive? Here are some thoughts of mine:

Specialist fields

As we can only do a good text translation job if we truly understand the subject area and the meaning and ideas behind the words on the page. Translation isn’t just about source and target language skills. A translator also needs a deep understanding of the fields that he or she works in. As a translator, you need very good general knowledge, it’s impossible to learn everything about everything. The best that you can do is to learn a lot about your specialist fields, and really excel in those areas.

Don’t stop

Examples of bad translation are everywhere; you can always tell from the works that there are needs of increasing their translation competence. Yes, everyone is trying his or her best on the works, but who knows the things you don’t know? So just never stop trying to do your works better.

Prepare your road map

Give yourself some time to review your progress as a translator, identify what you need to work on and plan your development, including planning ways to improve your source or target language skills, translation skills, or knowledge and understanding of your specialist fields.

Take your time but never stop, little by little, you will increase your competence and raise the level of ability in the industry.