Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Translation technique


Corinne McKay

"We just translate"…or do we?

Early in my freelance career, I failed two translation tests in a row for two different agencies. Both of these tests were marketing/PR-type pieces, and the agencies’ comments went something like this:

Agency 1: “Your translation was too faithful to the original. The French text was not very well written, and part of the translator’s job is to improve on that.”

Agency 2: “Your translation sounded great in English, but it strayed too far from the original. We want a translation that is faithful to the original, even if the original is not well written.”

Since then, I’ve learned many lessons about translation technique and about asking clients for feedback on the type of translation they want. Recently, I translated some marketing materials for a cultural festival; the document contained some factual inaccuracies and was also written in a rambling, run-on style that I thought wouldn’t work well for a U.S. audience. Although I suggested a lot of possible edits to the document, the person coordinating the project immediately let me off the stylistic hook by saying “The original is really badly written; but hey, we just translate, right? Don’t drive yourself crazy over this; you didn’t write it!”

I think that this issue of whether “we just translate” is a big one in our profession. When we receive a poorly written source document, do we “just translate it,” or do we edit it for correctness and clarity? In theory, it’s nice to think that clients would be willing to pay extra for having their document “re-crafted” into the target language, but in practice this seems tough to implement. In addition, there’s the messy matter of conflict between languages. For example, most French documents make copious use of the passive voice: mistakes were made, profits were achieved, crimes were committed, fun was had. Changing these to the type of phrasing that’s more pleasing to the English-speaking ear involves not just a stylistic tweak, but a substantive one. If we eliminate the passive voice, someone has to make the mistake or commit the crime.

In part, I think that this dilemma has to do with our own pride in our work. We don’t want to return a translation that sounds terrible, but yet we don’t want to criticize the original, especially if our client wrote it. On the other hand, editing/rewriting a poorly-written original takes time, and most often we’re getting paid by the word. Feel free to submit your thoughts; do you “just translate”?


Corinne McKay

Link: Tips for translating corporate communications

Corporate communications materials are some of the most difficult and most business-critical documents out there when it comes to translation. The company culture, the target audience, the spin that the company wants to put on its news, the most-used grammatical structures of the source and target languages; all of these enter into the picture when you’re translating corporate materials.

Chris Durban’s ATA Chronicle column “The Onionskin” (my favorite part of the Chronicle!) recently highlighted this issue with a photo of the Crédit Agricole group’s annual report, bearing the headline “The Crédit Agricole group under scrutiny.” As Chris points out in the article, the original French term “regards” would more correctly be translated as “close-up” or “focus.” She goes on to emphasize that this tag line was created by a native English speaker, and that the issue lies more in lack of context than in mis-translation. Chris sums it up by saying ” ‘Crédit Agricole Under Scrutiny’ might be fine for an investigative reporter’s filing with a wire service (“…as the tax brigade waited in the wings…”), but it is inappropriate for a factual presentation of key corporate data to shareholders that one presumably wants to keep on board.”

Reader Dierk Seeburg sent Thoughts on Translation the link to an article in The Source for Communicators that highlights these same issues and offers advice to buyers of corporate communications translations. Its key points: avoid machine translation, make sure the translation conveys an understanding of your business, adapt your style to the culture and don’t take shortcuts, and always have local people review the translation.


Corinne McKay

Paper dictionary to the rescue

Web-based terminology databases are a wonderful thing for translators. As compared to the research tools of times gone by, we now have access to resources that are vast, free, and easily updated when new terms arrive on the scene. A few of my favorites are:

Industry sources such as In Trans Books carry paper dictionaries that outperform online resources (at least the free ones!) when it comes to niche specializations, but it still sometimes feels as if paper dictionaries are inching into obsolescence. I recently attended a presentation by a financial translator who, when showing a photograph of his office, said, “I keep my paper dictionaries on the shelves because it looks good, but I can’t remember the last time I used one, I just search on line.”So, it’s good to be reminded that in the digital age, paper still wins out sometimes. I was recently translating a dating website (a post in itself!) and was stumped by the adjective “chialleux,” which did not appear in any of my usual online sources and also gets very few Google hits on French web pages. To the rescue: the 2-volume set of Harrap’s New Standard French and English Dictionary (original copyright 1934, one of the contributors was born in 1888), with the verb chialer (“to snivel”) and the corresponding noun chialeur/euse (“crybaby”).It seems that the important lesson here isn’t so much whether web-based or paper dictionaries are best, but that it’s important not to discount one or the other; feel free to contribute your own thoughts on your terminology research methods.


Corinne McKay

How to do an acceptable job on a rush job

First, note that the title of this post is not “How to do a good job on a rush job,” because often the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Realistically, no translator does her/his best work under extreme time pressure, but the nature of the industry is such that deadlines are often tight. So, when a good client calls with a rush job, how do you ensure that your output is as good as it can be?

  • Understand the difference between a rush deadline and an impossible deadline. Everyone has a different definition of this, but to me, 4,000 words in a day is rush while 1,500 words in an hour is impossible. 15,000 words in a week is rush, but 10,000 words in two days is impossible, and I categorically refuse impossible deadlines.
  • Make sure the client understands that rush work is not going to be your best work. I think that using terms like “draft quality” or “for informational use” is a good idea; help the client understand that publication-ready work requires a reasonable deadline and several rounds of proofing.
  • Turn off the distractions. The home phone, your personal e-mail and your feed reader will detract even more from the quality of your work. Disable them until after the rush job is done.
  • Quickly review the document. There is nothing worse than churning out 1,500 words in two hours, only to find out that the last five pages of the document are a translation of the first five, or that there is an existing translation of what you just raced to translate.
  • Do some sort of quality assurance. Proofreading on paper, extensive terminology research and other steps that are crucial to the quality of a non-rush translation often have to be severely compressed for a rush job. However, it’s important to do some rudimentary quality assurance. At a minimum, look over the translation for any spelling errors that the spell-checker has marked (so that you don’t return the client’s annaul report or arcitles of incorporation) and then make sure that all of the parts of the document are there. For example, at least make sure that your translation includes the correct number of bullet points in a list, or the correct number of subheadings under each heading.

    • There’s no question that rush work can be stressful and does not produce the kind of result that most translators like to return. However, following these steps (and feel free to submit your own in the Comments!) can help increase the chances that you will do acceptable rush work.


Corinne McKay

Translating into non-standardized languages

The Google Alert for “translation” was all abuzz today with the controversy over translating the Bible into Jamaican patois. Here’s hoping that the Bible Society of the West Indies reads Translation: Getting it Right before forging ahead with the project, which it estimates will take 12 years and cost US$1 million; moreover, this story highlights the issues faced by translators who work in languages that are not standardized.

For most of us, a real dilemma of word choice results when two of our trusted terminology resources conflict, or when the meaning of the source text seems to be deliberately ambiguous. However, few of us have to cope with translating from or into a language that has few/no/radically conflicting written resources. For example, the Wikipedia entry for the Jamaican language states “Because of its status as a non-standard language, there is no standard or official way of writing Jamaican Patois (for example the word ‘there’ can be written ‘de’, ‘deh’ or ‘dere’; and the word for ‘three’ is most commonly spelt ‘tree’, but it can be spelt ‘tri’ or ‘trii’ to distinguish it from the noun tree). ” By comparison, coping with a disagreement between the Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique and the Presses Pocket French-English Dictionary of Computing seems hardly worth complaining about.

An interesting side note to the issue of non-standardized languages is the role that e-mail, texting and the Internet at large play in creating written language. Until the advent of e-mail and texting, most people’s writing was done in a formal context; i.e. school assignments, letters to the newspaper editor, complaints to the gas company, etc. Today, most of us write a great deal in informal contexts such as e-mails and text messages. Here in the U.S. we can see that spoken forms of words are now, for better or worse, often used in writing as well (“See ya!” “Gotta go!” “Gonna get back to work!”). In countries where the spoken language has historically had a more formal written form, for example Swiss Standard German (largely written) versus the many variations of Swiss German (largely spoken), many young people now e-mail, chat and text in the dialects that they speak, rather than the more formal language used in schools, government and the media.