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The most difficult documents to translate

October 20, 2021

Do you translate yourself or entrust this work to professionals? This question is often asked even by people who are fluent in a foreign language. They know very well that free communication with native speakers, reading books and understanding films without subtitles and dubbing does not mean the ability to flawlessly work with documents, and if such a need arises, they turn to specialists with sufficient knowledge and experience in a translation agency. However, not everyone can understand exactly, for example, a technical instruction even in their native language or correctly draw up a document that requires notarization. What are the most difficult texts to translate?

Narrow-profile documentation: translation difficulties
Legal and technical documents can be considered the most difficult to translate, including contracts and instructions that require knowledge of narrow-profile terminology, the use of fixed expressions and adherence to a given format of text presentation. Even special dictionaries will not help here, since the context is also important, and a simple search for an equivalent may not be enough. Moreover, it may simply not be found, and you will have to use descriptive approaches, which is extremely difficult to do without the necessary preparation. It is important to simultaneously maintain the style and take care of pragmatic adaptation so that the content of the translated text is correctly perceived by those who will read and use it.

It can be very difficult to translate documents related to the official business sphere, for example, financial, administrative or reporting. Here it is necessary, among other things, to pay attention to the clichés of expressions, abbreviations and abbreviations, to know the specifics of business correspondence and to find adequate language templates. All words are used only in their direct meaning, and discrepancies should be excluded. Thus, the translator must not only thoroughly know the language, but also understand the nuances of business etiquette, as well as be able to work with syntactic structures in order to achieve maximum clarity and capacity and accuracy of the text.