Translation brief form
Extracted text from creative-translation-brief.pdf:
Translation Brief Job Name Your Job Reference
Brand / Product / Company Where and how will the translated text be used? For example; web advertising, promotional emails, website copy, hardcopy letter, etc. What is the desired response from readers? For example; increased product awareness, that they buy into the brands products, etc.
Who is the target audience? Age Group Gender Social Group
Tone of Voice / Image / Style of Address to the Reader? Chatty / Informal / Respectful / Loud / Confident / Quiet / Questioning? Etc.
Reference / Context / Background Information resources Existing website / copy, previous translations, competitor websites, product/company information etc.
The One Key Thing to Communicate The most important thing about the product / brand / promotion that you want to get across to the audience. The central message.
4 comments
Sign in to join the conversation.
This is a helpful start. The process of writing the brief as I see it, involves imagination. Imagining how the text might be used and what I/we as translators can do to facilitate that happening. Another aspect to 'imagination' would be to do some research to supplement our intuition. The 'one key thing' is a nice way to describe the skopos or purpose of this translation with these people in this context. I have been thinking about the skopos as kind of the 'mission statement' of the translation. The translation brief is too much to keep in mind at all times, but the skopos or key thing is something you can keep in mind at all times at the translation desk. From there you can refer to the brief.
Thanks Nathan. I would say the brief is a way to make sure the skopos finds a practical outworking and does not remain only lofty-sounding platitudes. For example, I have asked translation teams to define their audience is, only to get the answer "everyone." It is only when I then get them to visualize an individual in their community to represent the audience that they begin to see that unless they visualize specific people (different than themselves), they will in fact translate for themselves.
I like the idea that unless we consciously think about other people as the very people for whom we are translating, we are translating for ourselves. I wonder how that might apply to context, unless we imagine the concrete contexts where the translation will be used...we are imagining it getting no further than the desk where we sit? One consernation with skopos theory I have experienced in dialogue with other translators is that whole concept of skopos theory sounds like "lofty sounding principles." Your observation about who we are translating for above makes it practical. The brief also makes things very practical, specific. It gets to the nitty gritty. Switching disciplinary fields now, maybe if the two concepts of brief and skopos are in a correct relationship, it works a bit like conceptual blending - we need the blend (the skopos) to help us 'compress' the long chains of reasoning (the brief).
Simon - do you have a brief template/ sample designed for Bible translation projects.