 Hello fellow freehands nerds. So today I wanted to talk to you about being bilingual and being a translator. Are they the same thing? Are they different things? If they're different, what's the difference? Etc. Etc. Etc. Now I'm bringing this up because this was a question that I got on actually it was on one of the YouTube videos I think about you know, if a bilingual person is a translator and what the differences are, etc, etc. And it just got me thinking and so then I was working on a translation and just while doing the translation itself a couple things came up which I, which I jotted down so I'm going to share them with you. Unfortunately, my experience as I mentioned before I'm an Italian to English translator so anything that I notice or that I pick up on will be from Italian to English. So the stuff I'm going to go through are Italian original texts in Italian translated to English and I'm going to show you why being bilingual isn't enough just to be a translator. By the way before we get into it and before I show my specific examples just briefly a couple of reasons broadly speaking why being bilingual doesn't make you a translator is that there are two different things. First of all being bilingual usually means that you can converse you communicate in two languages comfortably. It does not necessarily mean you're native in both languages. In fact, no one's native in two languages. Pretty much by definition native tongue is one is the language you're most comfortable with even if you speak two languages fluently and that's why translators by the way that's why you always translate into your native tongue because in your native tongue you know what's taboo what isn't you know how things are supposed to sound how they're supposed to flow and you can understand more of the context of the people reading it etc etc and this is a big reason also why being bilingual does not make you a translator because you don't inherently understand these things you understand these things through learning about them and by the way another thing is that when you're a translator a big part of what you do is writing I mean you know that's pretty much all you're doing you're just writing there but this actually means and people don't think about this often it means that you need to be a writer as well you need to be a good writer because and being a translator means being able to grasp whatever is being said this includes the tone and the audience of whoever is watching at the target market all that stuff and being able to transpose that into whatever language you're translating it into and you know into the same tone or context the target market or to change it through either localization or something along those lines depending on if it changes maybe a target market in one language is different from what the target market would be in another language or another country and you need to change it accordingly and so this can be you very difficult it really depends how difficult and how much it can change depending on the context things like advertisements and marketing yeah that can be very different in certain countries marketing is very loud in your face and other places more imagistic like with images and more metaphorical in other places more straightforward and I mean it changes all over the place and you need to be able to adapt to do those things but also you know I don't do these types of translations I do mostly financial and legal which tend to be very straightforward but even with what I do there are a lot of issues that need to be taken into account that translators know and learn about but bilingual people don't necessarily know okay so let's take one first example uh in Italian the the original sentence in Italian uh said una copia del rapporto di omologazione viene inviato a fornatore um and so how do you translate this a copy of the rapporto di omologazione would be the approval report a copy of the approval report uh viene inviato a fornatore is sent to the supplier so a copy of the approval report is sent to the supplier that's how it's translated and it's it's 100 correct and if you want to debate on whether you should use you know this term or that term we can get into it but anyway that's 100 correct however it's not at least not in terms of the translation and the main and the issue is the verb tense in Italian you say una copia del rapporto di omologazione viene inviato a fornatore this is present tense viene inviato is sent um but in English for these types of contracts these types of documents you always use the future tense uh you usually almost always use the future tense pretty much the only times you don't see it is when things have been translated from another language and you know we're ugly so anyway and so in in English it shouldn't be a copy of the approval report is sent to the supplier it's a copy of the approval report shall be sent to the supplier that's how it is and um and I mean just to give some more context he's a bit of a longer sentence at the end of the day the process of the verifica viene messa un rapport di omologazione che autorizza se è positivo il pagamento dei campioni acquistati e delle attrazature ordinate da the name of the company how do you translate this into English so at the end of the verification process if successful an approval report is issued to the authorized to authorize the payment of the purchase sample and of the equipment ordered by the name of the company that's how a bilingual person might translate it and correctly so except that's not how it's used in the contract it should be shall be issued the future tense at the end of this verification process if successful an approval report shall be issued to authorize the payment of the purchase samples and of the equipment ordered by xxx so this is something that you learn from being a translator that you know because you translate from one language to the other it's not something that you ever think about if you know both language fluently you might read this in Italian you'll read this in English they both make sense and you don't even think about the change in verb tense because they've just they both sound so natural in each language so it just doesn't compute so you might translate it into the present tense and and not even notice anything until you know someone corrects you or someone you know tells you how come all these are in the present tense and this isn't um and this isn't you know they're the all these are in the future and this isn't and uh so yeah you know look chances are in terms of whatever contract you write it won't change much most contracts they have say you know this contract is valid from so-and-so data from the date of signing something and then that's when things go into effect but let's face it that's the way things are written in the contract and it can't change something especially if part of it is in present tense and part of it is in the future tense so you know it's something to keep in mind um anyway then uh what else do I have uh oh yeah another thing I had well so another term that I had translated there was um prodotto for nito now prodotto is product for nide is to supply so a supplied product a product being supplied is the way to translate it except this isn't always a case sometimes it's the product being supplied the supplied product sometimes it's the product being provided the provided product you use two different terms in english it depends usually the difference is you know you supply like to a wholesale thing like a bit when you're speaking big volumes it's you supply while when it's smaller volumes is provide um but it really depends on the context but these two words can be used to translate for nide for nide is you know that's uh supply or to provide and um so you need to know which one to use depending on the context and unfortunately if you just think oh supply I know is for nide so I just use you know supply um it won't really work in english and uh so just another thing to keep in mind once again this this was just one contract the things that I encountered in this one contract that I thought would be interesting to show and just briefly one other example that I that I came about and this was um because I have a there's a friend of mine who is american english is native tongue american american but now he lives in lugano in the italian part of switzerland and he has a local wife he speaks italian fluently in fact like a native and you know that he's he speaks italian all the time so anyway he contacted me because they needed uh his company needed something translated and he's like we need to translate these statutes for my company and I was like okay uh that sounds a bit off but sure let me know so he sends me the stuff to be translated it says statuto the whatever whatever so and you know I wrote back out and I said something like you know blah blah yeah and I'd be happy to translate your bylaws and um but he kept calling them statutes and anyway I found that interesting because statutes statuto of a company is not a statute you have the word statute in english you have the word statuto in italian but when you use statuto in italian especially for the statuto of a company it gets translated as either bylaws or articles of incorporation once again depending on the situation one is more like internal one is more for legal purposes external anyway and in fact this from country to country they might be interchangeable or not but they're never translated as company statutes once again you only see this in badly translated documents but so um it has to be bylaws or articles of incorporation anyway I thought it was interesting that a native american a native english speaker still was more used to the italian way of saying it than the english way of saying it but anyway um and so these are just you know so it's very intricate things that you don't think about because words might exist in both languages but if you don't know if you know if this isn't first of all your native tongue that you're translating into and your specialty that you know well then it's very easy to mess these up and so you do need to know what you're doing and that's the thing um when you are bilingual you use both languages for fun to communicate here this here and the other but it is a professional you know it's a profession you need to be a professional when you do it so you need to know what you're doing and that's why being a translator is more than just being bilingual um and uh but it was interesting because the guy who made the comment he said everyone says being bilingual doesn't mean being a translator but I want to prove them wrong and just translate you know some stuff that I can use and I was like you know do that that's the best attitude you can have I'm going to prove them wrong I'm going to do it because at that moment if you can do it and you can translate things and do it correctly you've graduated from being bilingual to being a translator and that's awesome so but yeah you know it's not extremely simple or straightforward and definitely if someone is bilingual a lot of people what they'll do is you know you have a big company and rather than hire a translator they want to just use someone who's bilingual in the company to translate stuff and that's usually when you see these types of mistakes because you know they don't know and they don't they don't think about those things and so that you know that's why those mistakes can pop up so it's just something to keep in mind if you know any other reasons why bilingual people don't make translated like if they're not the same thing let me know maybe for your language combination you've seen something like this or for in your specific cases I'd be you know I'd be interested to hear about them but these are just some that came to mind once again just with this last translation that I was doing I might have others in the future that I want to share but yeah so be careful you know bilingual does not mean translator and so you really need to make sure that you know what you're doing and that you know the pitfalls and the mistakes that people can fall into when you try to translate from one language to the other so yeah that's pretty much it I hope you found this useful and I hope this helps you become a better translator and that's pretty much it for now I'll talk to you in the next video okay thanks bye