ABSTRACT
An understanding of translation is important to professional communicators and to teachers of business and technical communication. An understanding of the process and difficulties of practical or pragmatic translation inevitably leads to an understanding of the difficulties of information transfer between different cultural contexts; an ability to communicate in a second or third language inevitably opens career doors. Depending on their content-area knowledge, language skills, and cultural expertise, North American communicators will play a variety of roles in the enterprise of worldwide translation. Because knowledge is increasingly interdisciplinary, even if communicators work with documents of a single content area, they will still need the skills to research related areas that will bear on the translation of these documents. Communicators must have the analytic, interpretive, rhetorical ability to comprehend the pattern of ideas within a text as “extra-linguistic” entities for which the language constitutes but the vehicle.
