“la parole exportée”

A while ago, I discovered the WordPress Photo Dropper plug-in. Basically, what the plug-in does, it finds photos that have been uploaded to Flickr and are available for some limited uses. Many bloggers seem to use it now.

I thought it was a good idea to leave a comment on the photo page, thanking that person for the picture and telling them where I had used it. I got good responses from most members, and everything was fine.

Until a couple of days ago, when I received a dry comment from a third-party telling me that one photo had been stolen (from him), and to please delete it. I checked all the links provided by the third-party to support that claim and deleted both the photo (a nice one, I must say) from my blog and my comment from Flickr.

The owner of the photo is exercising his rights (I’ve decided that he’s he), and that’s absolutely right. Except that I had used that photo in good faith, and his tone didn’t encourage me to either congratulate him for a good picture, or even give me any desire to buy it.

I deleted everything, photo, comment on Flickr and comment to my blog, e-mail and all. I’m out of the loop now.

People who have their contents or products stolen are right to be mad about it. I’d probably be murderous if I found this happened to me. But reflecting upon it, and seeing how things are developing on the web, and everything in life is a lesson, I see this as a sadly missed opportunity for the owner. Given that the idea of that picture was really a good one, I think he could have handled this in a better way, at least as far as I’m concerned. Like: invited me to buy his photo, to look at his other photos, etc., still asserting his rights to them. Had he allowed me to side with him, I would have bought his photo. Instead, I feel as if I’ve been labeled as part of a gang of photo thieves.

A good lesson for the future, maybe…

How important is translation for your marketing?

I had previously missed this e-mail because it was caught by my e-mail account’s spam filter, and I noticed the heading just as I was deleting the whole lot in one go.

But thanks to spamming stupidity, it was here today again and I opened it.

Yes I know this was risky, considering some recent experience, but I am of a curious disposition and willing to take risks, and how could I resist the lure of this heading?

Nous avons beaucoup de programme de la lange FRANCAISES!

Because most of my readers are anglophones, let me try to be creative -I just love allowing myself to make mistakes!- and craft a fairly reasonable equivalent:

We have many program of the ENGLISHES langage!

In other words: three linguistic errors, and one formatting error in a 9-word heading.

Interestingly, the organization that blasts these e-mails out has a website, and I checked it. They use the same marketing hype there, but it has been edited and looks slightly better. Pity they haven’t thought of updating their marketing e-mails.

Now I have two unrelated questions, and your answers will be greatly appreciated:

1. Would you feel confident to buy some expensive software products in your language version, from a provider that crammed 4 errors in a 9-word heading?

2. And incidentally, would you feel confident to buy some expensive software from a provider that offered (for some) up to 95% discounts on the *standart* (their mistake, not mine) price?

If you value your foreign customers, how do you show it to them?

The dilemma:

I’m working on a monthly translation project with which I have a long-standing love-hate relationship, even though my client thinks that I’m managing rather well.

Much of the English copy that ends up on a translator’s desk was not drafted with French translation in view. In fact, on closer inspection, you will find that the copy wasn’t drafted with any of the other major languages of the world in mind. French, Spanish, German, Russian, to name a few, all happen to be languages that use more, and often longer words, than English.

This is fine when there are no space restrictions, and the translator is free to translate.

But things are less rosy when space restrictions are involved, for instance for headings, or copy intended for websites, or publications of any sort.

Maybe the English or American writer was vaguely aware that some translation would be involved at a later stage, but they had to include a given amount of data in their copy. Maybe their own copy was too long to start with, and they had a hard time fitting it in, and they have used up all 500 characters.

What can you do? Throw a tantrum, send an angry e-mail to your client, refuse to do the work unless they make the copy shorter for your sake?

That’s where professionals have to stick their necks out. Their reputation is on the line.

When a simple solution like nudging the font size a notch down behind your client’s back isn’t an option — ending up perhaps with a font size that’s so small that readers have to use magnifying glasses, or move on to easier-to-read articles — there’s no other way but to:

Take risks.

Taking risks is not easy, yet this is what professionals are paid for, whether we like it or not.

In this particular situation, the risks I take involve:

1. Deleting all unnecessary info (I didn’t say data). I know who the copy will be read by, the degree of detail required, possible additional props like photos, etc., so if for instance the copy includes a product model number and its extended name in 4 or 5 words, I translate the full name once, then I drop it in the rest of the text, using only the model number. That’s at least 20 characters saved per instance, more in some cases.

2. Make the text more readable. A couple of examples:

In technical documents written in the USA, product names tend to be repeated several times, sometimes within one sentence. This doesn’t really go down well in terms of style in the target language, at least in French. So using it once, and replacing it, as appropriate, by ‘it,’ ‘this,’ ‘this model,’ ‘this feature’ makes for a lighter style (and saves characters again).

Depending on the type of copy, again (this is all very context-dependent), two related sentences can be joined and a little cleaning up can be performed in order to make the relationship more obvious, in less words.

The translator should consider all options that make the reader’s task easier, of course with their client’s agreement. But slavishly translating everything without respect to readers is not translation, at least in this particular case.

Here the key words are ‘context-dependent,’ ‘as appropriate,’ ‘knowing who the reader is,’ etc. All this involves a good knowledge of the end-reader, and a direct relationship with your client.