| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Off topic: Jobs that make you lose your will to live Thread poster: Marie-Hélène Hayles
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| "Don't change a thing!" in (sloppy) jobs I could have done better | Jan 18, 2008 |
Though I'm basically a translator, I often go one or more steps beyond translation, such as DTP or video subtitling. On top of my working pair I also do these tasks in some languages that I speak, but in which my command is too limited to translate.
The worst is when I am asked to do this post-translation work with something already translated into a language in my own pair, with the instruction "Don't change one single comma! It was translated by [the big boss himself | nis neph... See more Though I'm basically a translator, I often go one or more steps beyond translation, such as DTP or video subtitling. On top of my working pair I also do these tasks in some languages that I speak, but in which my command is too limited to translate.
The worst is when I am asked to do this post-translation work with something already translated into a language in my own pair, with the instruction "Don't change one single comma! It was translated by [the big boss himself | nis nephew | his mistress | whatever]." and the translation is just as bad as it gets.
I feel like being ordered to carve typos in stone. Once I got a 90-min video, an interview with a renowned management guru, to time-spot and subtitle with the provided "material" which they assumed to be a translation. I'd trust that stuff to a pathologist, if you get what I mean. I was strictly requested not to change anything there. Among its countless shortcomings, there were: a) missing phrases; b) surplus phrases (unsaid, invented by the "translator"?); c) gross misinterpretations; d) blatant mistakes (e.g. "forty million" translated as "trinta mil" = "thirty thousand"); e) misspelling of proper names, and several others.
To have subtitles on the screen at all times when someone was speaking, I had to waive correspondence between said and written. Any bilingual spectator would think the translator/subtitler was high on dope.
Sometimes I get DTP jobs with a translation from/into one of my non-working languages which I could have done significantly better. It makes me question my refusal to work with these languages I didn't study so much, since there are people at large who make a living with a lesser knowledge of them than I have.
Now and then there is the brighter side of it. Once a long-standing client of mine asked me if I could "fix" a video translation for dubbing, done by a new translator they had found. They would have given it to me otherwise, but I had been on vacation at that time. The studio had returned it as "impossible to dub", so the whole job was postponed. I watched the first half-minute of the video while reading the translation, and made a gesture of tearing it in two. The client saw it and said "Yeah, that's the way to go. I can't do it myself because I actually paid for it. But you should go ahead, toss it, and start over." ▲ Collapse
| | | | | 20 word postcard - most gut-wrenching job I ever took | Feb 2, 2008 |
Yes. I have a client who every once in a while comes up with these really old, somewhat illegible German letters/postcards written 50, 60, 70 years ago. Prior to about 1950 German had a different script (not as different as Cyrillic or anything, but different enough that you actually have to learn it (it's called Kurrent or Sütterlin). SO, when this client had a postcard to translate I figured - hey - peanuts! This postcard was written in 1908.
20 words and about 8 hours later I w... See more Yes. I have a client who every once in a while comes up with these really old, somewhat illegible German letters/postcards written 50, 60, 70 years ago. Prior to about 1950 German had a different script (not as different as Cyrillic or anything, but different enough that you actually have to learn it (it's called Kurrent or Sütterlin). SO, when this client had a postcard to translate I figured - hey - peanuts! This postcard was written in 1908.
20 words and about 8 hours later I was so desperate, I actually called up my grandmother pleading for help, and talked her into coming to visit for a cup of coffee (she's almost 80 and that was a HUGE deal for her). Luckily, with the help of my grandmother who is much better than me at reading this insane script it only took us about 2 hours to decipher it...
10 hours.. 20 words... $2.80
I'm glad I don't own a gun. ▲ Collapse
| | | | OlafK
United Kingdom
Local time: 20:15
English to German
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Marketing material written in flowery Chinglish or any other English-hybrid language, texts with no structure, full of irrelelvant chitchat, redundancies, obscure references etc. and no real information.
| | | | PoveyTrans (X)
Local time: 20:15
German to English
| 5,000 words XLS files | Feb 23, 2008 |
5,000 words, six XLS files, internal 'cost coding' for an international trade fair company covering German speaking countries. Not a single full stop, comma or semi-colon in sight, just 5,000 words of pure unintelligible random entries for any possible costs incurred by any trade fair run by ABC Well-Known-Trade-Fair-Company covering at least one hundred sectors...NEVER AGAIN. EVER. EVER. EVER.
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Alex Eames
Local time: 20:15
English to Polish
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| Pinglish to English | May 20, 2008 |
I once had a large banking document that a client had had another person do Pol-Eng. It was about as non-native as a non-native thing can be. My client was furious because the translator hired said they were native.
It was bad bad Pinglish. Anyway I refused the job twice. Eventually the client begged and offered the full translation fee. I still didn't want to do it, but they were one of our original and best clients, so I relented - even though it was a weekend. They were in deep t... See more I once had a large banking document that a client had had another person do Pol-Eng. It was about as non-native as a non-native thing can be. My client was furious because the translator hired said they were native.
It was bad bad Pinglish. Anyway I refused the job twice. Eventually the client begged and offered the full translation fee. I still didn't want to do it, but they were one of our original and best clients, so I relented - even though it was a weekend. They were in deep trouble and I got them out of it.
They paid me a lot of money for it, but I still hated doing it.
There's a certain type of sentence structure in Polish commercialese/legalese which can only be translated well into English by splitting the sentence into two or completely reversing the sentence. They are found in a lot of legal documents and I hate them - particularly when they are rendered in Pinglish. The trouble with them is that in Pinglish they are utterly devoid of meaning. This was why the end-client had rejected the job.
Alex Eames
http://www.translatortips.com/
helping translators do better business ▲ Collapse
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