Learning Translation and Interpretation to Help Our Community

Learning Translation and Interpretation to Help Our Community

Every year, Wide Horizons (WH) School has many vocational trainings such as leadership, video shooting, healthcare, time management, sport and interpretation & translation trainings.

These trainings are very necessary and useful for us and our community after we finished this school. Moreover, these are privileged for us to learn those trainings because when we work in our COBs. We did not have any opportunity to learn these things before.  In this second-semester, we got interpretation & translation training. The students were trained by former students of WH who are Myo Tun (Coordinator) and Aung Than (Assistance Coordinator) in WH School. Firstly, we have question for you to think between those two. In your opinion, how is different between the interpretation & translation? You may think those are the same and you may be confused between them. Actually, those two have different definition and meaning. Here is the definition and meaning…

¯  Interpretation mean; “Interpret a spoken source into the target languages.”

¯  Translation mean; “translate a written source into the target languages.”

We have many steps and rules between translation and interpretation, which are very difficult to follow. However, no one can avoid those rules and steps. 

During this training, we did a lot of activities and participation. We divided groups and translated English story, poems and proverbs to Burmese. Moreover, we also translated Burmese songs to English and English songs to Burmese as our own songs. So, we were very happy and got a lot of experiences in this training. According to one of the WH students (2015-2016 academic year), he has different ethnicities in his community so it is very helpful for him. For example, sometimes foreigners come to visit to his community. Consequently, this training is very useful for him to interpret between them. Moreover, he said that he is going to use those skills in his mother organization by translation from Burmese to English or English to Burmese. Therefore, we are ready to distribute those skills in our community after we accomplish this school.