When you explain in depth complex translation problems to show how to solve them, you must overcome a big obstacle: To avoid bromides—like ‘You need to do more than just…
Posts published by “Roberto Crivello”
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As the race between MT and human translators intensifies, to maintain their competitive advantage when translating technical material, now more than ever, human translators need to provide translations which have…
You are searching for a translator, or you are (almost) ready to use one. You might have read several guidelines and suggestions on how to write your English copy with translation in mind, to make your translator’s job easier, including: don’t use idioms, noun strings, complex verbs, and contractions; avoid passive/complex sentences and specialized jargon; keep sentences short; and others. Are such tips useful? Should you follow them?
After you have ordered a translation, you might be surprised to find out that in your translated material many words have not been translated. Why’s that?
A couple days ago I was glancing at a renowned brochure on client education, written originally in English, and for the first time I thought about taking a look at its official Italian translation.
The Italian translation is generally good, however, at some point I couldn’t help notice a funny slip by the translator: The original “Each year, London’s Heathrow Airport moves over 65 million travelers from all parts of the world through its five terminals using internationally-recognized pictograms” has been translated with “Nel 2005 l’aeroporto di Heathrow (Londra) ha movimentato tra i suoi quattro terminal oltre 67 milioni di viaggiatori provenienti da tutte le parti del mondo, utilizzando esclusivamente simboli grafici concepiti per essere compresi con facilità dal più ampio pubblico internazionale.”
What’s wrong? (I will skip the over 65 million travelers who have become over 67 million in Italian.)
Every translator knows, or learns soon, that consistency is of paramount importance. And not just in translation, but in any kind of technical document. I remember reading a revealing comment on this regard by Don Bush in his well-regarded column “The Friendly Editor” on Intercom, the magazine of the Society of Technical Communication. (Unfortunately the column has ended, after several years. It had always good insights into technical communication writing.) At a conference, Bush recounted, a technical writer had stated that it was preferably to have a consistent error in a document rather that having an inconsistency only half of the time for the same error. And we can guess the reasoning behind such preference.