“I’m afraid I can’t accept that contract.”
Actually I said, “You’ve got to be fucking joking!” but I’m trying to give the impression that I conduct my business conversations with a sense of reserve and decorum.
“I’m not proof-reading anything that man has translated into English - it’s always gibberish, I can’t work out what it’s meant to say and it takes 17 times longer than just translating from scratch. Please let me just translate it.”
“But Klaus (for that is his name) is very proud of his English.”
“God knows why. Remember the last time?”
“What last time?”
“The 82-page brochure I translated, to which he added the glossy cover page with a logo and one word on it. One word. The name of the Greek capital. Without an ‘S’ at the end. How much did that cost to have that reprinted?”
And so it came to pass that I was sent a copy of the original, German text and I have turned it into a work of beauty. Or the English version of an exceedingly dull technical document, depending upon your point of view. Klaus mailed me this morning. I have to make an addition to one of the Material Safety Data Sheets at the end of the translation. It has to be in English and Welsh. If it hadn’t been Klaus I’d have said that I couldn’t do it, as it is, I’ve asked Jones the Neighbour if, when he’s finished watching Pobol y Cwm, he’ll do it. He just needs to know what Formamide is called in Welsh. Any guesses which mock the language and/or people of Wales or, for that matter, the correct answer, are welcome.
Song playing as this was published: Paula Cole - “Sonny Came Home”
:o)
Everybody thinks that translating is soooooo easy. God knows why!
Has someone sat on your keyboard?
Liseuse: It is easy. Just ask Klaus. He did English as a Leistungskurs in his Abitur and doesn’t know what all this fuss is about…
David: Badoom tish! Googling the offending words should explain all. I’m not sure how “It would be a very bad idea to drink this” is going to come out in Welsh.
I did an MA in translation yet I can barely spell my own name
Hannah Banana: Look at all the errors in this post. I obviously really don’t do proofreading - especially of blog entries - and I mostly only translate technical documents from a field I know well (and can charge extra for). Real translators I hold in the highest regard.
Don’t worry- I have never actually used my MA…who wants to translate French poetry?! I only did it so I could avoid employment for another year.
By the way, your blog is the only thing that has made me smile since I broke up with my boyfriend of 3 years on Monday so keep up the good work- I absolutely love reading your comments, especially as I have lived outside the UK too for much of my life. Now I’m back and wondering why!
Make it up. I once worked with the Welsh Office legal team translator (who incidentally refused to speak to me in welsh). One day she asked me if I could translate something. My correct answer was rejected because said word was “allready in use”. When I pointed out that this was a misstranslated, I was told that there was nothing they could do about that because the wrong translation had allready been published. As a 20 year old I was somewhat shocked. I love my language but if the Welsh Office can make up translations why should you make the effort?
p.s. I conceed that living in Germany for years and years has destroyed my linguistic skills but I am 90% certain that your headline is gramatically wrong, but nice try.
p.p.s. I have never seen Pobl y Cwm. I wish to make this abundandly clear.
Furthermore, what kind of idiot arrainges your work? They give a german some english work and an englishman some welsh translation. Now I am widely reputed to be one of the most stupid people on earth but even I realise that with a little bit of rearainging could have ensured that at least one of these jobs could have been done by a competent linguist. What the German would have made out of the welsh is a mystery but it probably would have guaranteed a good laugh.
Hannah Banana: Welcome to the blog and thank you! (I’ve decided to take ‘I absolutely loved reading your comments’ as a compliment. It could well mean ‘I absolutely loved reading the intelligent and witty comments of others, which your pathetic blog somehow manages to attract’ but let’s not think about that, shall we).
s: Fformamide maybe? Like ffilm? Well, not like ffilm, obviously - that’s celluloid - I meant the word.
It’s a German firm that has a product it wants to sell in the UK. They asked me to do some copywriting, press releases and translate an advert and product instructions into English. Klaus works for said German firm and thinks that employing an English native speaker to do the translation is “being a waist of money”. He also believes that adding a safety warning consisting of 2 sentences of Welsh to the end of a 12 page technical instruction document in English will boost sales to the University of Aberystwyth. And of course an Englishman should have been given 2 sentences to translate into Welsh - “It is just a dialect of English, no? And you studied in Glasgow, the Scotch and the Wales are very similar.”
p.s. Despite sometimes receiving S4C at home as a child when the atmospheric conditions were “right”, due to a weird alignment of hills (we never got a local transmitter for “real” Channel 4 until well after the interesting films with the blue triangle in the corner of the screen had stopped) - I don’t understand Welsh. The title of this post, I stole. If it’s incorrect, probably from the Welsh Office.