When translation rates are too high

You often see translators bemoaning falling translation rates and complaining of translation agencies that want to pay only a pittance.

Same of those translators, however, should pay much more attention to what they do than to the failings of translation agencies:

I've recently been asked to quote on an editing project where the Italian translator consistently misspelled "sì" as "si", "detto" as "ditto", "quel" as "quell", in addition to other mistakes such as "calico" for "calcio", "scora" for "scorsa", "so" for "si", "do" for "di", "siento" for "sento", "blocci" for "blocchi", and so on and on. In a short span of 107 words, I counted seven misspellings and two other errors, before giving up and telling the customer that this should be retranslated from scratch, not edited.

When they are paid a few cents a word, some translators are actually overpaid.

The importance of knowing measurement units

When I teach translation, I tell my students that they should learn well at least the most common measurement units.

Case in point from a translation I'm doing at the moment.

The source text already provides conversions, but at least in one instance they are wrong:

"...leaving about 1-2 inches (51-103 mm) of wire..."

If it is 1 to 2 inches, then the measurement in millimeters should be 25 to 51 mm: 51 to 103 mm is 2 to 4 inches.

I pointed out this conflict to my customer, who opted for "...2-4 inches (51-103 mm)..."

I believe all technical translators (especially those who edit other translators' work) should be able to spot such inconsistencies at a glance.

Pointing out such insidious errors is usually appreciated by customers, and tells them you are paying attention to what you are doing.

Saving a few dimes while spending a ton

We spent the last few days of our Christmas vacations in Vienna, visiting several of Vienna's many wonderful museums.

Most of the exhibits in the shows bore interesting explanations, often with an English translation. Neither my wife not I know German, though we can sometime puzzle out some simpler texts, but even so we caught a couple of obvious mistranslations:

At the Leopold Museum's show on the Vienna art scene up to 1918 the English translation of a note on the origins of WW I said the Sarajevo assassination was due to the ultimatum issued from Austria to Serbia.

Since the ultimatum of course followed the assassination, either the German original was strangely wrong or the translator had a shaky knowledge of modern history.

At the Belvedere, in the show celebrating Gustav Klimt and the Kunstschau 1908, the English legend under a costume design by Emil Orlik said it was "a design for Shakespeare's 'Das Wintermärchen'". That is, the English label gave Shakespeare's title in German. The correct translation should have been "a costume design for Shakespeare's The Winter Tale", or perhaps "... for a German staging of the Winter Tale".

The problem here is not so much the mistranslations themselves: one can usually get a laugh with some of the mistranslations found in shops or tourist sites around the world. These, at least, have the excuse of being written by people with little knowledge of English for their own little shop.

But when one finds such errors in a city that justly prides itself as one of the foremost cultural capitals of the world, and in shows otherwise set up with much care, it is discouraging to see how little attention is paid to translation, how clearly an afterthought it is, how cheap it is bought. It likely cost more to produce the high-quality lettering proudly displaying such howlers than was paid for the translations themselves.

Major cultural institutions as the Leopold Museum and the Belvedere (and others around the world) should budget a little more, and give more thought to avoid such embarrassing mistakes.

Guns and Overtranslation

The English text used as a source language in an online translation recently concluded contains a word that may easily trip the unwary: "gun".

Heathrow Airport is one of the few places in England you can be sure of seeing a gun.

In the translation into Italian, many translated "gun" as "pistola". Others chose to translate it as "arma da fuoco" or simply as "arma", and a single translator as "fucile" (rifle).

Unfortunately, although "pistola" may be the translation that first comes to mind, here it is wrong. In the feedback section, I objected to this choice of words, but most commenters disagreed, pointing out dictionary entries clearly showing "pistola" as a legitimate translation for gun.

The dictionary, however, is just a tool; it is up to us to use it wisely: "gun" should be translated as "pistola" only when it means a handgun. I would have no objection if "Doc Holliday was the fastest gun in the west" was translated as "...era la pistola più veloce del West". All of us have a clear image of the wild West as a place where rough justice was meted out by Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in "My Darling Clementine" or by Gary Cooper as Marshall Will Kane in "High Noon" armed with a six-shot Colt 45 Peacemaker.

But the guns carried and used by security police at airports, to guard against terrorist threats are, usually, small machine guns (i.e., "mitra" or "mitragliette", in Italian), and not the pistols or revolvers dangling from the belts of policemen (and women) in most parts of the world - but not as yet, save for airports, by British bobbies. So, unless one knew for sure that British anti-terror police are limited to hand guns only (and they are not, as you can see below), the correct translation should be "armi da fuoco" or the superordinate "armi". The translation of gun with "pistola" here is a case of overtranslation: adding more detail to the translated text than is warranted by the original.

And the objection of those who justified the use of "pistole" for guns because it was one of the terms suggested by the dictionary? One, reality trumps any reference book, and, two, "cannone" also is found in the dictionary under "gun", and while British police are more heavily armed than with puny pistols, they are not (yet) issued cannons and howitzers to blast away at travelers who forgot the strict limits on carry-on liquids.

By the way, a simple image search in Google clearly shows that the British security police weapon of choice appears to be a machine gun or short automatic rifle, see for example:

Appendix

I run a short analysis of the terms chosen by the finalists for the major Romance languages and for German:

        weapon          firearm           pistol       revolver
German      waffe       2   schusswaffe   3
Catalan     arma        3                     pistola  3     
French      arme à feu  5                                 revolver 2
Italian     arma        2   arma da fuoco 1   pistola  2  
Portuguese
(European)  arma        5
Portuguese
(Brasilian) arma        8                                 revólver 1
Rumanian    armă        2   armă de foc   2   pistoale 1
Spanish     arma        5   arma de fuego 2      
Total                  27                13            6           3

Editors

A good editor is an essential part of a translation team, but working with a bad one may be a nightmare.

• A good editor must be a good translator, but sometimes a good translator is not a good editor: a good translator who has too high an opinion of himself and who is convinced that the definition of error is "something translated different from what what I would do" is unlikely to make a good editor.
  
• A good editor must know when to change things that are not real errors. This may be necessary to achieve an appropriate register, to standardize style and terminology in team projects, to follow the style guide provided by the customer, etc.
• A good editor must also know when, instead, it is better to leave things alone (for example, when the translation is done in a style different than one would use, but which is still appropriate).
  
• A good editor needs to know how to indicate when a translation is wrong, how to indicate the type of error, and when instead to indicate that the changes made are preferential.
  

When I work as an editor I tend to make many changes in the translations I receive. But I also take care to say to the customer when the corrections are because of real errors (serious or otherwise) and when I am suggesting stylistic changes. For example:

"You'll see that I have made a lot of changes, but the translation was not, in fact, incorrect: these are almost all preferential changes made to give more of a "marketing" flavor to an otherwise correct translation."

"Italians" - Letter About Translation Bloopers

Beppe Severgnini's Italians today published a letter by Mauro Luglio ("Le traduzioni dei manuali d’istruzione") about translation errors, especially in instruction manuals.

Among the bloopers quoted: "Attenzione! Noi vogliamo farvi godere!" (on the user's manual of an electric shaver)
"Attenzione! L'orologio non deve mai essere messo sulla testa!" (from the instructions of a cuckoo clock)