“la parole exportée”

photo credit: Keith Bacongco

I was reading this very interesting article on Google’s new Translation Center, when my eye was drawn to the last comment:

Machine translation is still far from being perfect, and regular translators are very expensive. In a flat world this service should cost next to nothing.

I’m always amazed to see how people will easily discount other professions, simply because they stand in the way of money. As if translators were making indecent heaps of it, anyway.

I have a much simpler answer to their problem. In the flat world of wishful thinking, I’d like money to grow on trees. Alternatively, medicine should be a free service, er… no, better still, nobody would need medication or surgery, bread should appear in bread baskets and nobody would have to buy it, neither would we have to pay for water, electricity, and cars would run on air, instead of insanely expensive fuel.

Let me be extra-adventurous, I’m dreaming of a really flat world, that would be rid of psychopaths, dictators and idiots. It doesn’t cost anything to ask, anyway.

I’ve been following this blog, Translation-Language-Culture, for some time now, where Werner Patels describes many thoughts that I’ve also had over the years, sometimes in much stronger terms than I would ever dare to use.

Apart from the heading, I could have written a very similar post to this recent one: Moron Clients. His point is very clear, but I tend to think that this kind of mishap is often due to dangerously inexperienced young clients. I had a short-lived bad experience with an Excel file once, until I sorted out what exact problem the project manager was having with my file (there was no problem, in fact). The irony of it is that you probably couldn’t find someone who knows less about Excel than me. (I mean, about the real Excel, the spreadsheet, not the fake ‘word processing‘ Excel.) Well, as it turned out, this was not true.

Another case in point was a Powerpoint presentation that I was asked to translate. Powerpoints can be hard, because people often try to cram too much, not always well-written information in the bullet points. By the time the copy has been translated, the slide is full. I think it’s a real shame that people who need to share about their own companies, interests, findings, can make such a poor job of it.

So after sweating over that translation, I was approached by the people in charge of ‘QA’. They had some queries and I found that an editor had transformed one of the bullets that I had painfully translated so as to make it readily understandable without losing any of the meaning, into a mangled sequence of words, making it totally unintelligible, and introducing a few spelling mistakes for good measure.

I e-mailed them back within 2 seconds, telling them that since this was not my own translation, and it was very bad, there was nothing I could do for them, ‘I’m very sorry, but…’ Because they trust me, they backed off immediately and used my original translation, but that didn’t solve the problem. I shouted them down, but nothing had been learned from that experience.

I admit that I’ve almost given up on trying to educate clients. Translation is a field that few people really understand, or care about, or simply have time to care about.

Maybe I should simply use the disclaimer that Werner Patels suggests:

My advice to all translators: always keep copies of everything and, perhaps, include a clause in any agreements or contracts that you will not accept responsibility for any changes or modifications made to the document after you have delivered it.

It’s probably just a coincidence, but the blog name ‘Certain Ideas of Europe‘ (on the Economist.com website) brings to mind the ‘certain idea of France’ that has informed so much of France’s foreign policy in the past decades.

But the post I found, a fairly old one for this day and age, since it was written in January, has this heading: ‘Five months left to learn French‘. It’s interesting and funny, as I’m reading it just after France started its 6-month turn at leading the European Union. I have written somewhere that this made for a very lively Spring season in the conference interpretation community. My bet is that the Fall season is going to be busy too, and I am already predicting an incredibly crazy month of December, with -as is always the case, but probably even more so with this Presidency- the outgoing country desperately trying to finish off jobs, putting together last-minute agreements, in the hope of leaving a remarkable legacy. Hmmm.

The post concludes with a quote from the French European Affairs Minister, saying:

“Also, a European presidency in which we will be using French to communicate, a great deal.”

Ha. Indeed. As a professional translator, I can only applaud. More business. This is one of the favorite themes of this Presidency. We’ll see. However, what I found really funny, were the comments. Same old stories. Same old rivalry. Same old tally of who in Europe wants to speak English, not French. (What about German? Spanish?) Same old accounting of how much French the English language has absorbed over the centuries (and vice versa?). Same old squabbling: ‘French is a dead language.’ No, it’s not.’ ‘Yes it is.’ One could have argued: ‘What about British English?’

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Do we care?