Assignment 1 (author, text)

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Before I started translating I read text carefully several times in order to get the main idea, to try to conclude what the story is about. Once I read it, I ran across some difficulties as it was impossible for me to find out the plot of the story just by reading this small excerpt since I did not read this book before. Therefore, I looked for all information I could find on internet and wikipedia.com offered some really good stuff. I read a short biography of the author of the book, found out all about the genre and read a summary. It seemed enough for me and I started translating.

Before writing it down, I tried to figure out how this translation should look like, where is the boundary when it comes to translation and how much freedom I, as interpreter, actually have. 

The moment I started translating, some difficulties appeared. First of all, I did not know whether I should transcribe character's name or not. Then, there were names of places such as River Valley Farm, Garden City, Holcomb which confused me even more. My poor experience in translating made me leave them the way they are. 

It took me a while to convert his pounds into kilos, his "feet" into meters, etc.

The sentences were long, it was hard joining small parts of it and trying to make sense of it all. It was quite challenging translating those institutions such as Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations,  Federal Farm Credit Board, etc. 

The text itself was not that hard to translate, there were no difficult words, scientific terms, idioms, etc., so I would grade it with 4 on a scale from 1 to 10. 

All in all, I managed to finish it. But I definitely expect next time to be way better.