Knowing a foreign language alone is simply not enough. The plain truth of translation is that a text must be understood before it can be translated.
Arabic translators translate from English language into their mother tongue, which is Arabic. In other words, a translator should ideally be a native speaker of the language he/she is translating into. Somebody may possess excellent bi-lingual skills, but hiring him/her as a translator is a sure-fire recipe for disaster in translation, unless she is also an expert in her field.
Medical and scientific writing has its own turn of phrase. In medical texts written in German, for example, Anamnese is a commonly used word. Dictionaries give anamnesis as the English equivalent - and a translator who relies solely on dictionaries is looking for trouble. Why? Well, medical practitioners the world over never use the expression “anamnesis”
By the same token, hiring a translator with specialised subject skills to the exclusion of language skills is no less prone to pitfalls. For instance, a subject expert may spend many a sleepless night over the English equivalent of Patientengut, a German word best translated as “patient records”.
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