“la parole exportée”

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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WOW! Wasn’t that awesome?

Some of you (many if not all) are probably rolling on the floor laughing at my innocent starry-eyed comment, but exchanging links is not something I do everyday, and I have no squirms admitting it.

I spent ages debating whether I should or should not ask one LinkedIn connection (a client) to give me a recommendation (he did). Now I’m working on getting more recommendations from other clients, but debating with myself takes a long time…

I don’t even exchange business cards, even though I have some brand new ones I had made especially for that purpose and described in a post recently. Thinking of which, why don’t I post one here, in case I forget to take it out of my purse next time I meet one of you. This is actually a combined scan of the two sides of two different cards.

I am not even ashamed to admit that I am the type of person who ignores every tip and advice you read online. They sound like very good advice indeed, but I’m simply not that kind of person. I keep a huge list to refer to later, like this one here that I liked very much.

(“and she’s telling us she’s been in this business for nearly 30 years?“)

Anyway, to cut the story short. I exchanged this link with a fellow translator, I happened to read his new blog and I loved the spirit of it. And he’s so good with words that he is using this title that I am getting utterly bored with, ‘Lost in Translation‘, twisting it in a very nice way. Have a look under English Language Translators’ Blogs in the sidebar.

Back to work now!

I can’t help pass on the story I found from writemindset.com, here.

The title of this blogger’s post is: Who writes articles for $1. And why?

Don’t think that the topic is irrelevant to us, just substitute ‘translates’ for ‘writes’.

Anyway, the supporting anecdote is taken from a book by marketing expert Harry Beckwith.

It runs like this:

‘To hammer the point home, Beckwith adds a story about a carpenter. In this tale, a man who has a squeaky floorboard calls in a carpenter, who quickly finds the problem and fixes it with three precise blows of his hammer.

The carpenter pulled out an invoice slip, on which he wrote the total of $45. Above that line were two line items:
Hammering, $2
Knowing where to hammer, $43.’

See the link? Enjoy!

The United Nations have declared 2008 the International Year of Languages.

But if you listen to the global buzz, you might think that you don’t need ‘languages’ any more, Globish (Global English) is THE language that will get you everywhere, in particular in business.

A number of companies consider it as the way to save.

Save on what? On one essential aspect of international communication: language diversity. So if that is the case with your company, you will undoubtedly find some interesting insights in this excellent broadcast on Radio France Internationale.

The title was: ‘Interpreters in the world of business’, and several professional interpreters, as well as top players in the field of global business were interviewed.

It’s true that for medium-level meetings and communication, conference interpreters will be less and less needed. Why is that so? Because business executives are increasingly made to use English in their daily interaction with their foreign counterparts, and even among themselves! But it also means that they need to be trained (and this has a cost too).

Did I say ‘made’? That’s because I’ve had many opportunities to discuss this with French business executives, some of them extremely FLUENT in English. They resent the fact that some meetings held in France have to take place in English. They would very much prefer to use their own native language to work faster, and better.

For important business negotiations and top-level meetings, interpreting will continue to be needed, if only to ensure that the top management are allowed to speak in their own languages. But not only them: one case in point are the EWC’s (European Work Councils) set up by European multinationals. The participants in EWC meetings are management and employee representatives, and the latter do not necessarily have the command of English (nor do they receive the kind of language training…) that would enable them to follow the meetings in any meaningful and positive way.

So interpreters now have a bigger role in business. They have made the switch from diplomatic conferences (their main line of business when simultaneous interpreting was invented, just after World War II) to business conferences, and they are a most valuable part of them, not only as language interpreters, but as cultural mediators too.

Take Chinese. As the Chinese interpreter points out in the interview, the Chinese are not giving up on their language, quite the contrary. Why should they, anyway? Very high-quality Chinese interpreting is essential to many business deals. If the two sides can’t communicate efficiently, what happens? The deal falls through or is delayed. The Chinese have enough suitors at the moment to afford to pick and choose.

So, the United Nations have declared 2008 the International Year of Languages. Are you doing anything for your language this year? Any plans? I’d love to hear about them.