Introduction

The present article suggests five main skills for any novice translator who wants to start their career in interpretation and/or translation. The required knacks and dexterities contain reading comprehension skills, analytical skills, computing, and CAT skills, researching skills, and writing skills. These skills involve multiple minor or micro-skills that the translators have to acquire and practice well. These skills are the results in need of further assessment and analysis.

Reading comprehension:

Translation consists of multiple stages that we take care of at the beginning of our career but after that, stages become a unified whole and unconscious for the translator.
Simply reading a text is, in itself, an act of translation. When someone reads, he/she does not store the words read in his/her mind as happens with data inserted by a keyboard or a scanner into a computer. After reading, one does not have the photographic or auditory recording in their minds of the text read. Everyone has a group of impressions there, instead. The person remembers a few vocabularies or paragraphs accurately, while all the remaining text is translated from the verbal language into a language pertaining to another system of gestures, one still mostly unknown: the intellectual language. The reading process necessitates knowledge and getting trained in topic sentences, connecting words, phrasal verbs, relative clauses, inferencing, skimming, scanning, reference words, logical relationships, synopsis, word knowledge, taking notes, and basic essay structure.


Researching Skills:

It is the most prevalent and still vague as the article suggests that the dictionary is known to both speaker and hearer. It is indicated that there are multifarious dictionaries, thesaurus and glossaries that a translator should refer to; a monolingual or bilingual dictionary, a dictionary on a historical basis, dictionaries of current English, dictionaries of idioms, specialized ones, encyclopedias, neologisms...etc. This wide range of dictionaries suggests that it is no single dictionary that the translator is supposed to refer to, each and every time s/he translates. The choice of the best, or the most beneficial dictionary, still relies greatly on the kind and context of the source text before translation, and on the different kinds of users.


Analytical Skills:

Translation features analysis and synthesis stages. The translator scrutinizes the Source Language (SL) with the purpose of fully comprehending. The amalgamation phase occurs when the SL is shown to the reader; that is, the notion that the translator thinks of the typical readership that lies in the meta-text. The text can be decoded in two ways: overall and miniature analyses of the actual text: Searching for consistency and adherence, and checking for rationality between the actual text and the potential type of text. Miniature analysis main job is to check the text adherence and inner consistency of the single units of text among them. The overall investigation targets controlling consistency and adherence between the made text and the category. Translating a manual or handbook is different from transcreating an advertisement or localizing a story or a poem in terms of targeted researching milieus and resources.


Writing skills:

Now the mental construction deriving from interpretation seeks an outer realization. One outline is aimed at expression, the other at coherence. The translator, after finalizing their interpretive work, has two objectives: first, to get the set of impressions caused by the text awareness, translate into speech acts the intellectual material secreted by contact with the text; second, to make this product internally consistent, i.e. transform a group of speech acts into a text. He/she identifies landmarks in the passage from mental content to written text in these terms: pinpointing elements useful for discrimination of the content to be expressed from similar contents; pinpointing redundant elements; choice of lexis and attention to their interconnection; choice of grammatical structures; order of words; part of speech; sentence complication; prepositions and other words that have a certain function.

Computing and CAT


Undoubtedly, literacy nowadays does not mean reading and writing drills, but in some countries, the term extended to include Computing literacy. Novice and student translators in the intermediate level are required to be aware of the very basics of operating the computer, such as basic computer components, software, and some manipulations like turning it on and off, opening programs, using right and left clicks, creating word, Excel, and access files, and using different web browsers to surf the internet, send and receive emails and use search engines effectively. In addition, CAT tools are part of the software used on computers. They have the same features as other apps like opening, closing, updating, and installing them but they are somehow distinct in using them in the process of translation itself such as uploading files for translating, using TMs and TBs in the CAT tool, translating texts, using Google Translate feature, generate target files…etc. Competition between freelancers (Those who work freely without restriction, from homes or anywhere and have the choice to choose the task they prefer upon price and conditions they accept) on the global market and seeking for translation quality in the era of the Internet do compel translation specialists to search and employ new tools (ranging from vocabulary to translation management systems) and solutions in their continuous tasks. This sub-competence is especially crucial as it covers technical skills which are increasingly often sought by outsourcers (employers). In commercial desktop programs, the majority of these plugins require a regular fee to be paid in order to use them since they are external solutions.


Conclusion

These few lines covered so far, the basic skills and strategies that student-translators, as well as novice ones, need to familiarize themselves in translation tasks. The main skills proposed are; reading comprehension, researching, analysis, writing, computing, and CAT skills. The skills and strategies presented in this part of the chapter represent just the basic level for beginners and students, however advanced and professional translators may find them important too. These skills were analyzed because it is related to the process, rather than the product, that gives insights into language learning skills in general.