Everything has two fundamental aspects that may be termed hardware and software. The former endows appearance, structure and frame to attitude, function and content, while the latter gives individual differences to the former. They are the what's and how's of all entities. For all walks of life, there are hard skills and soft skills worthy of mastering. Hard skills are profession-specific general requirements and soft skills are what makes some individuals distinct from others.
For translators, there are two major prerequisites for obtaining perfect hard skills: linguistic proficiency at the minimum level of well-educated native speaker in both languages and intellectual capacity to comprehend any source text and render its content accurately, clearly, fluently and elegantly. Hard skills can be measured by linguistic and factual accuracies. A translator with the basic linguistic and intellectual armamentarium should be able to translate a source text of any field into a target text equivalent to a well-written original parallel text. At this golden age for translators with the Internet guru around everywhere and anytime, the quality of a translated test relies largely on Internet search and research skills. A translation of 99% accuracy means 1% negligence and lacking intelligence because 100% accuracy is only a matter of instant learning and tenacious research in the Internet school.
On the other hand, soft skills remain unique traits of individual translators who are able to render the extra service of improving the quality of and adding values to source texts, which presupposes linguistic and intellectual faculties excelling those of original authors. An additional trump card is empathy. A translator which can easily empathize with the spirit underlying the matter at hand and its essence can easily use the pen as a scalpel to carve out the best possible aesthetic outcome, even transforming a beast into a beauty. Defenders of classical translation theories emphasizing the importance of faithful rendering of the source text may furrow their brows and even give a fail mark to such a translation (admittedly, the result is sometimes closer to ghostwriting than to translation), but in the name of the common intellectual assets of humankind, especially under the aspect of knowledge sharing, I would even go as far to say that cloning an inferior figure would be a sin if creating a superior figure out of it is within the translator's capacity.
For translators, there are two major prerequisites for obtaining perfect hard skills: linguistic proficiency at the minimum level of well-educated native speaker in both languages and intellectual capacity to comprehend any source text and render its content accurately, clearly, fluently and elegantly. Hard skills can be measured by linguistic and factual accuracies. A translator with the basic linguistic and intellectual armamentarium should be able to translate a source text of any field into a target text equivalent to a well-written original parallel text. At this golden age for translators with the Internet guru around everywhere and anytime, the quality of a translated test relies largely on Internet search and research skills. A translation of 99% accuracy means 1% negligence and lacking intelligence because 100% accuracy is only a matter of instant learning and tenacious research in the Internet school.
On the other hand, soft skills remain unique traits of individual translators who are able to render the extra service of improving the quality of and adding values to source texts, which presupposes linguistic and intellectual faculties excelling those of original authors. An additional trump card is empathy. A translator which can easily empathize with the spirit underlying the matter at hand and its essence can easily use the pen as a scalpel to carve out the best possible aesthetic outcome, even transforming a beast into a beauty. Defenders of classical translation theories emphasizing the importance of faithful rendering of the source text may furrow their brows and even give a fail mark to such a translation (admittedly, the result is sometimes closer to ghostwriting than to translation), but in the name of the common intellectual assets of humankind, especially under the aspect of knowledge sharing, I would even go as far to say that cloning an inferior figure would be a sin if creating a superior figure out of it is within the translator's capacity.
