Three days ago, Liz Dunn Marsi & Tucker Johnson hosted an insightful discussion on Clubhouse, the new promising live podcasting app, about “The Intersection of Language, Culture & Growth” where they shed light on what goes into launching products globally! The room hosted a lot of well-known localisation/ translation figures: Marina Gracen-Farrell, Michael J. Asquith, Rodrigo Cristina & Gabriela Kouahla & of course me!
I enjoyed listening to all the insights and came to the conclusion that:
If you find a game, an app, a product, a book, or even a certain service speaking your mind and reflecting your cultural identity/ passion in a way that reaches you then the localisation mission is accomplished! And that’s why localisation/ translation is important; it is a living organism that accompanies you 24/7 invisibly through us translators & localisers!
One of the common myths about localisers & linguists that they just replace a word in a source text with another equivalent in a target language!
However, hiring a professional localiser means echoing the tone, meaning, style, and lexicons to reach you, your ICA, or your targeted culture i.e. speaking your tone & writing your way + offering culturally sensitive renderings!
In many contexts, we translators/ localisers have the green light to use different lexicons and sentence structures that make sense before your target reader while adding our secret sauce to make your text read like your OWN original notwithstanding the specialisation!
In a nutshell:
A translator/ localiser is a disguised writer and researcher sometimes an engineer, who manuipulates your words like a marionette!
This is a work of love! I haven’t seen many resources addresses to translators/LSPs specifically. Thanks for sharing.