In translating this text, I feel like I was challenged quite a lot which I was not really expecting. Therefore, I mostly went with the strategy of staying as close as possible to text. I thought this was the best way to translate this specific piece of work as I felt it would get the meaning across better and it would also portray it similarly to the Spanish version that the author decided on. The author is an extremely intellectual man, and this shows in his work by the type of language he used and the way in which he constructed this book. I found when researching this book, there was not a whole lot of information out there about it. In order to get a better feel of the book I read the description of it online before I purchased it and then upon purchasing, I immediately read the introduction section of the book. Later,upon my first reading of certain chapters, it came to light to me that there was one thing I had never heard of before and felt I would need to explain it a bit. In the third chapter, an area called Wirikuta is mentioned and the people from there are called Wixárika or sometimes referred to as Huichol. Wirikuta is a sacred area high in the mountains in central Mexico and the Wixárika people that are referred to are descendants of India.
As a result of trying to cater for a slightly large audience,of all ages and social classes, I have had to take a lot of aspects of translation into consideration. The first aspect that I had to take into consideration is the language used in the original text. I feel that this language is most suited for people who are aware of scientific words etc. As a native English speaker, I often found the translated words quite challenging and I needed to further my research on them through a various number of dictionaries as well as the use of thesaurus from time to time. Overall, I always checked items I was unsure of in three different dictionaries at a time and I chose the best option. If I was still unable to comprehend the meaning of certain phrases or words, I then turned to some of my Spanish speaking friends and asked them, or I would get help from my lecturer who made this process easier for me. As the translated piece was to be aimed for people of all ages, I have tried to tailor the piece in a specific way to make it reader friendly for all age groups concerned. However,in order to ensure the translation piece was suitable for older and more educated people I had to be certain that the language used wasn’t too simple and boring. I believe that I achieved this quite well as I think I have used the perfect balance of concise and accurate language that portrays the intensity in which the author of this book was attempting to get across.
One technique in particular which I found quite helpful for me was quickly reading over the text in Spanish first to try and get an indication of what the chapter in question was about. Then I read the chapter a second time and highlighted any words or phrases which I thought would be problematic to me, this was made easier for me as I used an online Kindle Reader to read this book and it has a highlighting tool. After this, I decided to focus on these words or phrases and tried to find a few possibilities for them. Finally I translated the chapter sentence by sentence while deciding on which translation best suited what the Author was saying.
Another area of this text that I found quite challenging was that the passive voice was used quite a lot in Spanish, which as I am led to believe is not a very common thing in books. It was often difficult for me to distinguish which person it was in and who was doing the actions and so on. With the guidance of my lecturer, my eyes were opened to this problem and I became more aware of it while translating. I also found it difficult to distinguish between the direct objects and the person doing the action, I feel this is due to not having read similar texts in Spanish before hand as well as being new to the translating aspect of language learning.
