Other forms: translators
A translator is a person who takes writing in one language and puts it into another. The name on the second page of a novel from Japanese, whoever turned the washing machine manual into English, a woman working through a contract clause by clause.
The verb is translate and the work is translation. The distinction worth holding on to is the one with interpreter: a translator works with text, on paper or on screen, with time to think and to go back; an interpreter works with speech, live, while people wait. Translator also covers machines — a pocket translator, an online translator — where no person is involved at all. And it stretches past language: a translator is anyone who takes something difficult and hands it over in a form ordinary people understand.
1nountranslatorA person whose work is turning writing from one language into another.
“The novel's translator spent two years on it.”
2nounmachineA machine or program that converts words from one language into another.
“She held her phone up and let the translator read the sign.”
3noundifficultSomeone who turns difficult material into plain language for other people.
“The best science writers are translators more than reporters.”
translator is a profession.
Also accepted in games: interpreter
Translator arrived in English twice over, from Latin translator and from Old French translatour. Underneath both sits Latin transfero, to carry across, built from trans, across, and fero, to bear or carry. A translator is a carrier: someone who picks a meaning up on one side and sets it down, unbroken, on the other.
Proto-Indo-European
*telh₂- (bear)
Old French
translatour
Middle English
translatour
French
translator
Latin
trānslātor
English, today
translator
Built from
Directly from Latin trānslātor and French translator, and also from Middle English translatour, from Old French translatour, translateur, etc., from Latin trānslātor, from trānslātus (“carried across”) + -or (“-er: forming agent nouns”), from trānsferō (“carry across”), from trans (“across”) + ferō (“bear, carry”), q.v. Equivalent to translate + or.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA