 Hi, welcome back. Today, I'm going to talk to you about translation to and from many different languages. If you've been translating for a while, chances are you've come across other translators or maybe you're one yourself who says they can translate from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian, into English, Ukrainian, Swedish, German, and Norwegian. Obviously, I'm exaggerating a bit. But you find people who can translate from many languages into many languages. Is this legit? Is this possible? Should I be doing this? How does this work? Exactly. I just wanted to give my two cents about it. First of all, we should specify there's a source language and there's a target language. The source language is the language that the original text is in and the target language is the language that you're translating it into. If you're translating from Italian to English, the source language is Italian and the target language is in English. Usually when you're a translator, your target language is the language you're more comfortable with. If you're translating between two languages, even if you're fluent and native in both, you're usually a bit more comfortable in one language than the other one. So if you're translating from Swedish into French, chances are you're more comfortable with French. If you're more comfortable with Swedish, you should be translating from French into Swedish. If you're an interpreter, by the way, it's the other way around. For now, if you're a translator, you do written translations. You should be more comfortable in the target language. That should be your native tongue you consider your mother tongue. Let's say you translate into English. You're pretty good at translating Spanish into English. You consider yourself pretty much fluent in both, but English is your native tongue. Spanish to English, that's what you should be doing. Maybe you're also pretty damn good at Portuguese, so you're wondering if you should also do some Portuguese translations. Yes and no. Yes, by all means you can try, but again, you should be doing Portuguese into English. Always go into your native tongue. To make it brief, in synthesis, in summary, it's a lot more common to have quite a few source languages that you translate from and usually just one target language that you translate into. When you see people who translate into many, many different target languages, then some red flags should go up. Especially for an end client, red flags will go up. Now, if these two languages that they translate into are similar, then yeah, you know, they could see that happening. But you'll find people who say they can translate into English, into Italian, into Ukrainian, into Swedish, and there definitely red flags will go up. And by the way, a red flag sometimes also goes up when you say you can translate from Spanish to English and English into Spanish, because one of those languages should be more comfortable for you. So only one of those should be your target language. So anyway, these are just things to keep in mind that your target language is the one you're a lot more comfortable with. That's your mother tongue. Source languages, there's a bit more variation and clients know this, they understand this. So when you tell them, I can translate from French and from Italian and from Spanish all into English, they'll understand that and that'll be fine. If you start telling them, I can translate from English into French and French into Spanish and Spanish into Italian and blah, blah, blah, blah. Then it starts getting a bit more iffy. And also keep this in mind when you're dealing with other translators because you'll get a feel for what they're talking about. Maybe if you can trust them as much as you thought you could. Look, you find translators of all different types and of all different skill sets, but the rule of thumb you can go by have more source languages and fewer target languages. And any translators you meet who have that, chances are they're pretty legit. Just as a quick addition, this is just my personal viewpoint. I would advise you to have fewer languages, especially when you're starting out. If you feel more comfortable translating from Spanish into English, then just stick to Spanish and English. If anything, have more specializations, finance and legal and marketing, but stick to just fewer languages, at least you can get a track record. Clients, if they see just two languages, they feel safer, that it's more trustworthy. If they start seeing a bunch of languages, then they start thinking, no, there's no way this person can know this many languages fluently enough for a serious translation. My personal advice would be choose two languages, try to get clients with those two languages, see how you do. You might feel differently. If you do, feel free to let me know. That's about it. That's all I have to say about this subject. I hope it helps and I hope it clarifies some things about source languages, target languages, and about translating to and from many different languages. And once again, if you liked it, please click like. Please feel free to share it with anyone who you think might find this useful. Don't forget to subscribe. Once again, on this channel, I'll have tips about freelance translation, freelancing in general, translation in general. So feel free to subscribe for regular videos that have to do with this world. If this is the world you're interested in or that you're currently in and you would like to learn more about it, about translation and freelancing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'll talk to you next time. Sabidum!