Spanish word translation

Spanish word translation is just one type of translation style or method, but I find that this is usually very inadequate when trying to translate something longer than a few words.

What do I mean by Spanish word translation? Well, this is when a translator decides to focus on one word at a time when translating, instead of keeping the entire document in mind.

I'm pretty sure that most professional translators don't translate this way, and instead look at the whole article or document or whatever they're translating so that the can keep the context in mind.

However, it is easy to focus too much trying to figure out the correct translation of a single word, forgetting that by taking that word in the context of the paragraph or article, the translation almost automatically manifests itself.

I even find myself falling into this trap once in a while when I don't know exactly what the author means by his or her use of a particular word. I might stop translating right then and spend a couple of hours or even a whole day trying to come up with the right equivalent in English and it's not until I skip that word and keep translating that I'm able to figure out what the author meant and use the right word in the target language.

Some translators might ask if Spanish word translation is ever beneficial and I say that the only time it should be used is when there is no context for the translator to refer to when translating. This hardly (if ever) happens but there are times when it can.

For example, say you have been given a job to translate a bunch of text messages for a client building voice recognition software or something similar. Many times, text messages are only a couple of words long, and maybe only a word. There might not be any context to those messages to help you figure out how to translate an ambiguous word.

Maybe you're asked to translate "échale" from Spanish to English and you're not given anything else from which to base your translation on. Now that can be pretty difficult, especially since this word can have about a million different meanings.

In this case, you'd have to use Spanish word translation and go with whatever you feel would be the right translation and hope for the best.

(In thinking about this, however, there are extra-linguistic clues that might help you figure out the best translation. Maybe you don't know who wrote the message or to whom it was written, but in this case you do know that it is indeed a text message, and clues like that could help you narrow down your translation choices.)