Source-Language Comprehension and Text Analysis
Read the text before you read the words
Comprehension begins above the sentence. Before translating anything, identify the text's function (informative, expressive, operative), genre (contract, press release, clinical report), audience, register, and communicative purpose. These macro features constrain every micro decision later, so a candidate who starts at word one is already behind.
Then analyse at sentence level
Work through propositional content (who did what to whom, when, with what modality), cohesion (pronoun reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunctive links), and lexical chains that signal topic continuity. Watch for scope - of negation, quantifiers, and modifiers - because meaning lives in the structure, not in isolated terms. Distinguish what is asserted from what is presupposed or implicated; a translator must carry the implicature, not flatten it into an assertion.
Traps that show up in questions
- Treating a plausible reading as the only reading; ambiguous source segments usually need the wider co-text to resolve.
- Missing a second negation or a restrictive relative clause that changes the proposition.
- Ignoring paratext: titles, headings, footnotes, tables, and formatting often carry meaning.
- Confusing the author's stance with the subject's stance in reported speech.
Rule of thumb
Draft a one-sentence skeleton of each paragraph in your own words in the source language - subject, verb, object, and the logical connector to the previous paragraph. If the skeleton will not hold together, you have misread the syntax, not the vocabulary. Only then start looking for target equivalents.