Logical word order

It is sometimes easy to be misled by he word order of the source text, and to translate using a construction that means something different from the original.

From a contract I recently edited:

English: “Please read the following penalty schedule carefully”
Italian: “Leggere le seguenti informazioni sulle penali con attenzione”

Here, the position of “attenzione” is only awkward, rather than misleading. It would be improved by moving the word closer to the beginning of the sentence: “Leggere con attenzione le seguenti informazioni sulle penali”.

However, in other instances the word order might mislead the reader, even if only for a moment:

English: “… [of the] electronic end user agreement…”
Italian: “… dell’accordo di licenza con l’utente finale elettronico…”

Strictly construed, this translation might be interpreted as “…of the license agreement with the electronic end user…”.Since we do not have “electronic end users”, “electronic” in the original can only refer logically to the agreement; meaning that the agreement appears online or in some electronic media, such as a CD or DVD.

The source text should therefore have been translated as “…dell’accordo elettronico di licenza con l’utente finale…”, or maybe “…dell’accordo di licenza elettronico con l’utente finale…”, but certainly not *“… dell’accordo di licenza con l’utente finale elettronico…”.

Pay attention to the logical word order in your translations: when you read with fresh eyes what you wrote you'll sometimes see it means something different from what you intended.