A professional is defined as a person who exercises a certain profession, that allows him or her to make a living. This definition is very ample and does not distinguish between a veterinarian, a teacher, a handyman, and a translator.
A translator must be a professional, cannot be an amateur or an improviser, and this applies especially to literary translators. He is required to be very rigorous in his work to guarantee a true version of an author's book and neither to defraud that author nor the reader. This, combined with a special talent, a profound knowledge and mastery of both the source as well as the target language, in addition to complete dedication to the task and plenty of time to do it right, make a good translator.
Very frequently one hears the comment "traduttore - traditore", which means that a translator is necessarily a traitor. This might be true very often when some people think that, just because they speak English or Spanish or German at home since their families are of such extraction, they will be able to perform good translations. Thus, they just go ahead and translate books written by important authors without really having the ability to do it. Most often their work is amateurish, not to say of very poor quality.
In such cases the publisher himself frequently may be at fault, because he does not thoroughly revise the work he gets and publishes it without subjecting it to a rigorous control.
Very renowned writers have said that to write a book is difficult and requires long and dedicated hours of work, but that to translate a book is even more difficult, maybe the most difficult of all endeavors.
But the inept tanslator thinks otherwise: he or she is convinced that to translate is very easy. He simply translates word by word instead of expressing complete ideas. Thus, the translated text is not easily understood by the reader who has to interpret the author's concepts very often falsified by the bad translator.
As already said above: a good translator, especially a good literary translator is a real professional and artist who not only masters his own language, but also the one from which he translates, who has a profound knowledge of the people and the country he is dealing with when translating a foreign author, and whose educational and cultural background is such that he has the real ability to interpret every concept the original author expresses.
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