Spanish help and Spanish translators

As a Spanish translator, is it OK to ask for Spanish help in your translation work?

I think translators just starting out might have more if an issue with this than translators who have been in the industry for a while.

When I was just starting out, I was confident in my abilities. However, I thought that translators were walking encyclopedias who had all the answers and that asking someone for some Spanish help was akin to advertising my inability to translate.

I was somehow led to believe that if you asked for help, not only would the person you asked for help from look down on you, but that you would be stigmatized by potential clients for the rest of your career. I know, it sounds pretty drastic but it's not far from the truth of what I thought.

What a difference ten-plus years has made!

More and more I've realized that a good translator isn't necessarily someone who knows how to translate everything off the top of his or her head but instead is someone who knows his or her limitations and how to overcome those shortcomings by asking for help when it's needed.

The help I've needed in my work has come because of a lot of reasons. Sometimes I've needed advice on how to go about translating a specific grammatical structure. Other times I've needed to run the English translation through a non-translator to make sure it sounded "native." There have also been times when I've needed Spanish help: I maybe didn't know the exact meaning of the Spanish word.

My point is that if you're a translator who us just starting out, don't get caught up in the mentality that you have to have the answer ready for every issue that you come across.

Especially with the Internet, there is no reason to not collaborate with other translation colleagues from across the globe. It's stand to reason that at least one other person out there has run across the problem you've encountered in your translation and more likely than not, that person will be wiling to help you out, just like we should be willing to help other translators out with their translation issues.

Most important, I think that it really is a sign of a mature translator to ask for language and translation help (and help others along the way as well).