For those of you whose first language is not English, you may be tempted to try writing papers in your first language and then translating them into English after you're done.
Here's a story to illustrate why this is a really bad idea. Early in my editing career, a native Arabic speaker (I'll call him Mike) contacted me to assist him with his master's thesis. He had written the entire thing in Arabic and had then translated it into English himself. He had two issues, though:
When I was pursuing my undergraduate minor in Spanish at the University of Michigan, our professors always warned us not to write our papers in English first, and they did so for the exact reasons I showed above in my story about Mike. Those who wrote in English first had to undertake much more work to prepare a draft in Spanish, and when they did, the final product was not nearly as good. The professors could always tell who had written their papers in English first, because those papers received lower grades! If you need to translate a primary source article in your first language for your own academic papers, this is a different matter; however, I still recommend getting a professional translator or a fully bilingual friend (like someone born in the US, but raised by parents who speak your first language) to do the translation for you. Translating from your L1 to your L2 is always more difficult than translating from your L2 (for me, Spanish) into your L1 (for me, English). That's why I offer Spanish to English translation services, but not English to Spanish translation services!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
June 2021
Categories
All
|