From Competent to Excellent

From Competent to Excellent
The Distance Between Doing the Job and Winning the Race

As a professional translator and amateur researcher, I occasionally have the privilege of checking others' work. I also often have the honour of received checked copies of my own work. In both of these cases, what becomes quickly apparent is that there is a great gap between work that is competent (i.e. that ticks all the right boxes) and work that is excellent (that makes you sit up and go "wow"). Since it is one of my goals to always produce and encourage excellent work, this blog post will talk about how wide the gap is and how to cross over it.

What do I mean by competent work? Well, after five or more years of university education, most new professional translators will be able to produce work that is both accurate, readable and will do the job. They might be able to produce a translation of a users' manual that you can use without risking injury. They might be able to translate websites that don't make you immediately want to go elsewhere. However, many of these translations are still "translation-y." There is still something about them that makes you instantly aware of the fact that they weren't originally written in your language. Maybe the sentence structures are a bit off or maybe there are too many strange idioms. Whatever it is, something isn't quite right.

On the other hand, read some of the work produced by the rare few "genius" translators and you feel exactly the opposite. Take "The Message," a new translation of the Bible by Eugene Peterson. Unless you were told otherwise, you might easily imagine that it was written in the past decade or so by modern English speakers. It leaps off the page and captures your heart and mind. What about the translations of books by Watchman Nee? If you didn't know better, would you for one second believe them to be translations?

The difference isn't just clear in translations. Think about it. How many people can kick a football, pass it to an opponent and do a few keepie-ups? But how many of those same people will ever make it to a Champions League or World Cup final?

If you believe some people, crossing the chasm between competence and excellence is impossible. "If you ain't got it, you ain't gonna have it," is their battle cry. Stop it with the pipe dreams, give up, sit down and live like the rest of us.

But there is a whole host of evidence that such a view is simply wrong. For example, K. Anders Ericsson, who has dedicated his life to studying expert performance in a range of fields, believes that practice has more to do with performance than you might think. In fact, in a recent article in an Interpreting journal, he stated that the only factors that could not be improved by regular, focussed practice were body size and height. Everything else, he says, can be developed and improved.

So, what is the "focussed practice" thing? According to him, it involves finding structured exercises to work on your weaknesses with the advice and guidance of a coach. The job of the coach is to keep you in line and to locate exactly the areas that need toned up. Maybe for a translator, this might mean finding a style workshop to keep their writing skills in shape. For a preacher, it might mean working on sermon structure or delivery. For footballers, it might mean ball control or shooting exercises. For theologians, it might mean asking more experienced scholars to check your work. The list is endless but the advice is the same. Find a coach or mentor and work, work, work.

The truth is that the gap between good and great is not as wide as you might think. Even those who are born with "it" have to keep "it" in shape. Even experts can only stay experts as long as they keep working. In the end, it all comes down to how far you want to go. Sure, you might never be able to dribble like Maradona, but what about your writing skills? What about your love for working with children?

As the Bible says, do everything as if you were doing it for God (Colossians 3:23). We have gifts from God and are expected to use them (Matthew 25: 14-30). So, push hard to reach the best level of performance you can. After all, if the difference between "competent" and "excellent" is only practice, what have you got to lose?