“Every person who studies Japanese learns the four fundamental pillars of the language: reading, writing, speaking and listening. The fifth pillar that nobody tells you about, however, is translation.
Sure, you might assume that anyone who knows two different languages can easily translate one to the other. They know them, after all, it should be simple … right?
Nope, not the case. And I’ve heard many stories about how this presumption has led to more than a few awkward situations in the workplace. Even the most fluent among us have been called into a meeting by a superior to interpret for a client and, in the moment, accidentally caused insult by speaking too casually to them.
Translation and interpretation are themselves two different skills, each with their own quirks. The former, of course, is the act of conveying written text from one language to another, while the latter consists of conveying spoken dialogue from one language to another. It’s not a given that if you can do one, you can do the other — and even if you speak Japanese well it doesn’t guarantee you can do either.”
#metaglossia note: Totally agreed. In metaglossia, the same claim is factored in from the onset; precisely because from this perpective, translation/interpreting is first and foremost viewed as a metaglossic (or metalinguistic) skill, a reformulation activity, be it intralingual, interlingual, intersemiotic or otherwise, so long as the reformulation results in communicating exactly the same information.
Source: Translation: The fifth language skill no one tells you about | The Japan Times