Let me be honest with you: Translating is not just about looking up a word in the dictionary. And it’s certainly not going through a sentence word by word. You need to understand the matter you’re translating, otherwise you may as well use Google Translate and deal with this garbled mess! But apart from the words, we must also bear in mind cultural particularities, such as the metric system. For a cookbook we’ll need to convert cups into grams, ounces into milliliters. On the European continent you want to accelerate your car as quickly as possible from 0 to 100 km/h, in the US/UK from 0 to 60 mph, so you do the math. The British and the Americans are right-handed knitters, for German knitting, you hold the working yarn in your left hand. That’ll make translating a pattern complicated! And finally, in Europe water boils at 100 degrees, but in the US only at 212 degrees ;-)
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