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"to turn from one language into another or from a foreign language into one's own," was what I thought I had wanted to do when I was younger.

Then, I learned the word 'to interpret'.

verb (used with object)

1. to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate.
2. to construe or understand in a particular way.
3. to bring out the meaning of (a dramatic work, music, etc.) by performance or execution.
4. to perform or render (a song, role in a play, etc.) according to one's own understanding or sensitivity.
5. to translate orally.

Sometimes I had to learn that translating doesn't always work if the statement requires context. Words such as 'home run' or 'grand slam' have little meaning if one is not familiar with baseball jargon.

Over time, I realized that I was not cut out for this. I still pick up newspapers or read short articles or stories, but I haven't gotten back to the many hours of painstaking translation. For me, I never quite felt as if I were good enough to master the craft. I didn't ever have the enormous vocabulary. And I also lacked the total and immediate recall of identification.

One of the easiest translations is a sentence in the present tense without an indirect object.

The following present tense sentence is translated into a few languages I have studied
Der junge Mann lacht.
Le jeune homme rit.
Il giovane uomo ride.
El joven hombre ríe.

When translating it into English, we are taught that the options are:
The young man laughs.
The young man does laugh.
The young man is laughing.
These are the simple present, the emphatic present, and the continuous present.

Of course, there is also the present perfect and the present continuous perfect, but those for another day.

As time went by, the sentences got longer. And one day, in class, we were given the following sentence that was written in 1806. I recognized the author to the instructor's surprise. (He used an archaic <or unknown> spelling of the last word).

In St. Jago, der Hauptstadt des Königreichs Chili, stand gerade in dem Augenblicke der großen Erderschütterung vom Jahre 1647, bei welcher viele tausend Menschen ihren Untergang fanden, ein junger, auf ein Verbrechen angeklagter Spanier, namens Jeronimo Rugera, an einem Pfeiler des Gefängnisses, in welches man ihn eingesperrt hatte, und wollte sich erhenken.

It contains 52 words! Other than the name of the country (Chili), the year (1647), and the protagonist's name (Jeronimo Rugera), everything else needed to be translated. Mind you, there was no WiKi translate when I was tackling this in the late 1970s.

I quickly ran it through Wiki and got the following:

In St. Jago, the capital of the Kingdom of Chili, at the very moment of the great earthquake of 1647, in which many thousands of people perished, a young Spaniard, accused of a crime, named Jeronimo Rugera, stood by a pillar of the prison in which he had been locked up, intending to hang himself.

I am loathe to admit it, but it is pretty good. 'St. Jago', of course, should be Santiago. In a more contemporary translation, the sentence would have been broken into two or three smaller sentences. The sentence had way too much going on and I had not been officially diagnosed with attention deficit at the time. It was so easy to get distracted way back when!