International translation day is being celebrated each year on the 30th of September. The United Nations chose this day as this is the day when St. Jerome, a priest from North-eastern Italy, also known as the patron saint of the translators, died. The UN organize St. Jerome Translation Contest and celebrate multilingualism. This is the day when the importance of the role of translators and interpreters should be emphasized.
St. Jerome translated the bible into Latin. Believe it or not, it took 23 years for him to do it. It would have been much easier if he had CAT Translation Software at his hand, right? When he moved to Jerusalem, he also learned Hebrew and translated the bible into this language as well. However, he made one mistake and this is the reason there were images of Moses with horns which leads us to our next topic.
Why is translation so important?
We all know about situations when there was a translation to be done and we had to urgently find someone. Chances are this might have been just a regular email or a thesis and very often people ask their friends who just speak that language to do it. But is it that innocuous? Unfortunately, in some cases, it might be a ‘between life and death’ situation.
When the Covid pandemic started, there was a reported case of Hungarian women who unfortunately died in the hospital of New Jersey as there was a lack of interpreters for Hungarian. On another occasion, a man got paralyzed only because of one wrongly translated word. The Cuban-American baseball star arrived at the hospital due to severe headaches. Unfortunately, a Cuban Spanish term ‘intoxicado’ was mistakenly interpreted as ‘intoxicated’ and he was treated for a drug overdose. This left him paralyzed due to a brain hemorrhage.
This is why translation should be done by professional translators and someone who underwent the thorough translation courses and training and not by someone who can just speak two languages. Even though more and more people study and speak English nowadays, the translation industry keeps growing. The latest numbers say it is now worth 40 billion US dollars.
In our next article, you will read about translation errors that might have (or even had) led to wars – this is how much correct translation is extremely important. Keep this in your mind next time you need to hire a translator or an interpreter.
CAT Translation Language Studio was founded in December of 2020 as a result of 10 years experience of its founder Nataša Budišin. Nataša graduated in Italian and English, has earned 3 master’s degrees and worked for multinational corporations such as IBM, Amazon, RWL (former SDL), EY (former Ernst and Young) and many more.