Lippy service
To Sir Richard Fanshaw Upon His Translation of Pastor Fido
Such is our Pride, our Folly, or our Fate,
That few but such as cannot write, Translate.
But what in them is want of Art, or voice,
In thee is either Modesty or Choice.
[…] Less honour to create, than to redeem.
Nor ought a Genius less than his that writ,
Attempt Translation; for transplanted wit,
All the defects of air and soil doth share…
Now literary translation is one thing and, to an extent, in a class by itself. The bulk of workaday translation is for business, not pleasure. Letters, contracts, websites, endless turgid reports, signage, ad campaigns… The blablabla that keeps us off the streets from 9 to 5.
A few days back, Margaret wrote a piece on the woes of educating translation clients, citing sometimes outrageous turnaround times and the fact that, too often, customers’ sole criterion for selecting/comparing translators is price.
Leading me to believe that the state of affairs in Germany is similar to the sorry one in France.
(And, no, I don’t think that all this excitement over an expanded EU is going to improve things any time soon – though I’d love to be wrong.)
Coming from an officially bilingual Canada where the translation industry is fairly well regulated and highly structured, I still battle with dismay at the slipshod state of things here in the land of bureaucracy.
And still gobsmacked to find things like this made public.
The bath-tub cast iron of large mother in 170 X 77 traditional and indémodable with a beach for the valves and fittings.
(I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the work of cheap and nasty software… or the owner’s niece who’s studying English in High School, and getting straight Cs.)
There is a central translators’ syndicate here in France, the SFT, but to join you need only cough up the fees and prove that you’ve been working as a translator for at least a year. In no way required to prove that you’re any good at it. (I honestly don’t see the point.)
I suppose this state of disarray, and the spectrum from wankers to wizards, is true of a lot of businesses, and particularly for freelance workers. But still I’m flummoxed that people who spend so much on lunch, can be so stingy when hiring someone who provides a crucial element of their business – apparently perceiving translators as a necessary evil, at best.
On the flipside, of course, there are translators who are just plain incompetent but manage to get work because their customers are incapable of judging the final product (or because they charge 2 cents a word).
There was a comment to a recent posting here that I found quite telling:
I’m a contract writer for an insurance company and am responsible for “coordinating” the translation of said contracts. I have to confess to feeling rather frustrated when my translator comes back to me asking what we mean when we say “benefits payable on the death of the spouse will be payable to the employee’s estate if the employee is deceased and there’s no beneficiary designation.” He’s trying to understand it, for heaven’s sake. I, on the other hand, don’t want to understand it, as it just gives me a headache.
— cmb
I’m afraid my advice to cmb would be to get a new translator:the current one apparently stumped by very basic terminology.
Plus, now with the Internet there is no excuse for shoddy research, particularly for texts of a corporate or technological nature. I still marvel at the fact that, not so long ago, we had to rely near solely on books for our queries, along with the harassing of kindly industry experts (and that typewriters & white-out were the apex of technology).
So, I am very curious to find out how much attitudes towards translators differ from one country to the next, what the client-translator relationship is like in terms of communication, negotiating rates, turnaround time, understanding of the work performed, respect for the craft, etc.
I mean, honestly, how hard can it be to read a text in one language while typing it out in another?
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Comment
- What always blow me away are the translation efforts into Enlgish that have never been passed through the brain of a native English speaker, let alone a professional translator.
Check out the English at this Japanese site (Animal Rubber Bands) that Boing Boing points to today: http://www.plus-d.com/arb/index.html. Their first two sentences: “Doesn’t rubber band miss while it doesn’t know? Or through it away while it become unnecessary?”
I assume that things are just as bad going from English into Japanese—or French or Punjabi… etc. Izzat so?
Simon
— Simon Fodden May 2, 9:54am # - Not only was the language atrocious but the content was….questionable. Who the hell needs a rubber band that falls back into the shape of animal? Yen were WASTED there.
— Lauren May 2, 5:35pm # - Hey, at least the translation was consistant site-wide. In their lame Flash show about each animal, it was noted that the elephant had a long nose, and the hippo had a huge mouse [sic].
— susan bein May 3, 12:23am # - Somewhere in humanities, in a marginal field with marginal funding. Increasing pressure to publish in English. No funds for translators. No funds for proof-reading. The one native English speaker at the institute gets swamped with proof-reading jobs; one feels guilty for even asking her these days. Besides, she’s a tremendous scholar herself and should really have more time for her own work, and not achieve fame only for correcting others’ writings (as invaluable as this is to the rest of us). I have to confess: I myself have submitted my own English articles to publishers without proof-reading, and I know many others do so, too. And I do quite often end up translating from other languages into English, though I feel horrible doing this, as a native German speaker.
There’s just no recognition for translation and correction work in this area, which is perhaps even more depressing than the same situation in commerce and industry. Once I ended up correcting the English of a project application to the EU, written by a German project partner. The author then rewrote it himself, adding so many more mistakes that I really felt ashamed participating in the project (it did have my name on it). The application was completely unreadable. Guess what, the project was actually accepted, which leads me to suspect that at least certain EU offices consider applications predominantly a raw-material for paper-airplanes and grant projects depending on how far these airplaines fly … Oh, and, by the way, in the project application I had actually included funds for proof-reading of English texts, but the main applicant suggested we should rather call this part “secretary work”, as he believed the EU was unlikely to spend money on such things as translation. Depressing.
— katatonik May 3, 11:10am # - How about this one, seen on the outside of a packet of eco-friendly cereal from a company in British Columbia:
“66% empaquetant moins que notre cadre”.
I tried running the English through Babelfish, and bingo for the weird structure and use of gerund, but I could not work out “cadre” at all. I tried several mis-spellings of “box”, but I still couldn’t get it. I reckon that the 16-year old trainee was given the job of translating the packet, and that she used a combination of Babelfish and the dictionary, but looked up the wrong word. It’s the only possible explanation.
Anyway, what would we find to laugh at if everything were well translated?
— e May 5, 4:17am # - My wife and I are both French and we translate from American/English into French. We’re beginners really, we’ve only done a couple of novels. Last week we completed a coffee-table book for a big design/art French publisher. Of course it had to be done in a hurry and as it was supposed to be out simultaneously in the UK, corrections and addenda were pouring in steadily, till the very last minute. The most incredible thing, however, was the poor state of the original text, written in English by a native German speaker, hence strange syntax, scrawny vocabulary, etc. And downright crazy logical sequences. Guess who they tried to blame for the bizarre “mais” and “cependant” peppering the text?
— JR May 5, 11:05pm # - first off, katatonik, you should tell your colleague that the european headquarters spends basically half of their running expenses in translations. Figures approximate- i got them from translators and workers there, so i guess they’re somewhat trustworthy. And even if it’s a fifth of that, it’s still a fifth of a bazilllion so it doesn’t really matter. Anyways, translators cost more than secretaries there.
Personally, i have no problem with certain documents being written by non-natives. I could read a document in my field that had grammatical errors and mistranslated words (harbour-at-false is a nice word for cantilever, after all), and still understand it well enough.
There are limits, though, defined by pleasure and necessity. Pleasure, as in something i’d read to enjoy myself- no word-butchers near my books, please. And necessity, since it’s inhumane to have to decode manuals of electronic equipment in most languages- it would still be complicated if it were properly translated.
Then again, i love amateurism.
— eloisa May 6, 7:41am #
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