A month or so back, I was commuting back and forth between Kelantan and KL. It was tiring, but fulfilling at the same time. The reason was because I was attending a course on translation. I was among the few who responded to an advert in MOE’s website, asking if we wanted to learn how to translate. As I’ve been doing translation on a part time basis without any training at all it was a dream come true.

The course was jointly organised by MBKM and ITBM. It was a pretty packed course as we had classes/lectures from 8 in the morning up till 10 at night. They told us that the usual course as organized by ITBM would be less packed, but special request by MKBM means we get the fast and furious version 🙂

We started with the easy stuff, the basics of translation, why we do translations and so on. Then it was on to the more technical aspects of translation. How different field have different requirement for translation. Literal translation vs free translation. How much do you need to keep to the original text?

It was daunting at first, but we had great instructors plus the fact that most classes was hands on, and what we learn we immediately get to practice straight away.

Then we were split into two groups, one focusing on translating from English to Malay and another group focused on Malay to English translation. I was in the latter. From the start they had actually told us that this would happen and that as an end product of the course we would be translating some children’s book.

As I was in the Malay to English team, we were given unpublished children’s books courtesy of ITBM, these were obviously still in Malay and we were tasked to translate them. I sure was excited to do so, and I believe so was the rest of my group.

We got to work with two editors who helped us improve our translations. We really tried our best in improving the translations as we were told that the books will be flown to Bologna for the Children’s Book Fair there. Hopefully it would be well received there.

All in all, the course was excellent everything that I hoped it would be and more! New knowledge, new friends and best of all a book with my name on it?

Adieu 🙂