How do you actually learn to translate? As a trained linguist and translator with over 30 years of experience — including graduate study in the Translation program at the University of Puerto Rico — I’ve thought a lot about this question. The honest answer is that the most important lessons didn’t come from textbooks or lectures. I learned them en la brega: by jumping into the fray and getting my hands dirty. Here are three principles that have guided my work as a translator ever since.
About This Post
This essay grew out of a final paper I wrote for Trad. 6430 at the University of Puerto Rico under Professor Marshall Morris, my graduate advisor and thesis chair. I believe the ideas in it are as relevant today as they were in the 1990s — perhaps more so, given how much the translation industry has changed with the advent of machine translation and AI tools.
To Walk the Walk, You Must Talk the Talk
Experienced translators are likely to tell you the same thing: read everything in sight. Shampoo bottles, candy wrappers, instruction manuals, legal briefs, children’s books, technical reports. Not because you’re a masochist, but because you never know when something you read somewhere will suddenly appear in the middle of a translation you’re working on.
The goal isn’t just vocabulary acquisition — it’s register acquisition. You cannot write a letter that sounds like it came from the president of a university if you’ve never read how university presidents write. You can’t produce an OSHA compliance form that smacks of bureaucracy if you don’t know what bureaucratic language actually looks like. And you may struggle to write dialogue that sounds like a five-year-old if you haven’t listened carefully to how five-year-olds actually speak.
This is what linguists call register awareness — the ability to match your language to the context, audience, and purpose of the document in front of you. It is, in my experience, the single most important skill a translator can develop. And the only way to develop it is to read voraciously, listen carefully, and pay attention to how language works in the real world.
2. Trust No One
In Fox Mulder‘s immortal words from FOX Television’s cult favorite The X-Files: “trust no one.” Mulder was right. Successful translators are skeptics by nature. If you’re unsure of a term, a phrase, or a concept — don’t guess. Look it up. Ask a colleague. Go to the source.
This applies even when you think you know the answer. Especially when you think you know the answer. False cognates, regional variations, specialized jargon, evolving usage — the landscape of language is full of traps for the overconfident. The difference between a snitch and a Sneech might seem obvious, but the difference between verbal in English and verbal in Spanish is a genuine translation problem that requires research, context, and judgment.
In practice this means building a toolkit of reliable references and using them habitually. For Spanish-English work, my go-to resources include the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española, María Moliner’s Diccionario de uso del español — which I was first introduced to during my graduate studies at the University of Puerto Rico — and a network of colleagues and subject-matter experts I can consult when the dictionaries fall short.
The skeptical translator is not a slow translator. Knowing when and where to verify actually makes you faster, because you spend less time second-guessing yourself and more time making confident, informed decisions.
3. Know When to Say When
Translation is not a purely academic exercise. It is a professional service with deadlines, budgets, and clients who need deliverables. The overagonizing translator — the one who agonizes endlessly over every word choice — is as much a professional liability as the one who guesses carelessly.
A professor once shared with me a piece of advice he had heard from a working translator: “Just write something reasonable.” This has stayed with me for thirty years. It doesn’t mean settling for mediocrity — it means recognizing that the goal is a translation that serves the reader and the context, not a translation that satisfies every theoretical concern you might have about equivalence.
When the deadline is today at five, you pick the word out of the sentence, turn it over a few times, look at it in context, make your best judgment, and move on to the next sentence. Perfectionism has its place — but it has to be balanced with the practical reality of professional translation work.
What en la Brega Really Means
La brega is a Puerto Rican concept that resists easy translation — which is itself a perfect illustration of the translator’s challenge. It means something like “the daily struggle,” the act of wrestling with life’s difficulties and getting on with things despite them. Bregar is to cope, to manage, to push through.
I learned to translate en la brega — not in a classroom, but by translating. By making mistakes and fixing them. By looking things up and asking questions and sitting with uncertainty until it resolved into clarity. By reading everything I could get my hands on and trusting that it would eventually be useful.
Thirty years later, that’s still how I work. And it’s still the best advice I can give to anyone who wants to become a translator.
Conclusion
If you’re interested in the linguistic tools that support translation work — bilingual glossaries, vocabulary references, and specialized terminology — explore the resources available on this site. Whether you’re a working translator, a language student, or simply someone who loves language, you’ll find something useful here.
Andrew Lillie is a trained linguist and Spanish-English translator and interpreter with over 30 years of professional experience. He holds graduate degrees from Brigham Young University and the University of Puerto Rico’s Translation program.He has lived and worked in Argentina and Puerto Rico, which means he can argue about language in at least two distinct Spanish accents. He is the founder of Firefly Linguistic Services LLC and the creator of Spanish by Topic, a platform dedicated to filling the gaps in Spanish language knowledge. He currently lives in Oregon, where he shares his home with a very floofy dog named Jovie.
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