Translation Consulting Services
Some clients ask me from time to time to give a professional assessment of English to French translations that they are receiving from one or more different sources. Usually, they have their own doubts, and they want to take my opinion.
I value these calls for help that show their trust in my judgment and experience. So how do I approach those requests?
Rule #1: Find out the nature and the purpose of the translation to be reviewed. With a document for information, the issue is most likely to be with the *technical* quality of the translation. If the document is for publication on a website, or to be printed and circulated to a large audience, a more detailed assessment has to be made.
Rule #2: Produce a detailed report. It is vitally important to be totally bias-free, and writing the report is usually the most difficult part of the exercise. A detailed report that categorizes the errors found makes it possible to highlight what is really important and to cover ’smaller’ errors in a general statement such as ’some of the punctuation not in line with French rules,’ for instance. Furthermore, when you have a lot of editing experience and you have set high standards for yourself, you notice more details than the average reader would, and you have to hold back.
Once these 2 rules are established, how does it go?
Document for information: the easiest document to review is a simple report, a document for discussion or an in-house manual. You check the basics: terminology, grammar, spelling. This includes checking the consistency of terms. Consistency by the way does not mean uniformity. In French, some fine nuances can be expressed by using an article here, but not there. Native French translators should handle this with ease.
Style is not considered important, although I do not endorse this line of thinking. A language is made up of grammar, vocabulary, style and punctuation (I am always struggling with English/American punctuation, by the way). Style tends to be increasingly overlooked, probably because machines don’t ‘do’ style. Yet when translating into French, you often need to switch parts of a sentence, ‘complements’, and you do need to avoid repetitions: using ‘analyseur de spectre’ three times in the same short sentence IS a bit heavy!
For publication: all of these elements have to be taken into consideration, which adds to the variability in the accepted quality (or lack of quality) of translations. In my opinion, you shouldn’t ‘feel’ the English (or the source language) behind the translation.
Style here becomes very important. Too often, I review documents that I could easily translate back to English, word for word, capitalized titles and commas included, just by reading the French. The copy ‘looks’ good until I try to understand the actual meaning. Or, as an American friend was saying recently, the translation is ’subtly’ wrong, and you need to refer to the source document to understand what the translation means. Why have it translated, then? And with a minimum of experience of machine translation, you can tell which passage(s) escaped the post-editor’s attention… I swear this happened in a translation I was asked to review recently. No human translator is capable of achieving that level of ‘mistranslation.’
Now, what is the ultimate criterion for me?
In the same way that I always translate the introduction and the CEO’s letter last, these are the two components that I review last. They are the ultimate proof that the translator knew what is at stake here. Making the letter to be signed by the CEO, i.e. the client’s topmost Officer and Ambassador ring as if it had been written by a 12-year old, is a sure way to ruin a client’s credibility.
The real and only Rule #1: A professional translator should never forget that our client’s best interests lie at the core of our best interests.
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