Spanish Pronto translation issues blog

Translator's perspective on misconceptions, pitfalls, and outright dangers of translation, and on ways these might be remedied or avoided.

Friday, July 11, 2008

What is the Spanish word for...?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Translation buyers frequently suffer from this danger. They have had just enough Spanish in high school to know that there is a Spanish word for everything. On their tests, they matched English words with the corresponding Spanish words by drawing a line between them, or they wrote the Spanish word in the blank to replace the English word shown in parentheses.

From this limited experience, they know that there is a one-to-one correspondence between any English word and the one Spanish word that translates it. "Dog" is "perro," "cat" is "gato," "house" is "casa," and so on. So, naturally, what is true about words, must also be true about sentences, paragraphs, documents, and even entire books!

Translating, then, is just a matter of choosing the correct Spanish word for each English word. All you really need is a good dictionary that provides a translation for each word. And when it comes to hiring a translator, choosing between translators who charge 4 cents, 15 cents, or 50 cents per word is an easy choice: each of these translators will just end up producing the same exact translation, anyway, so obviously you should hire the cheapest one! Anyone who ever studied a language in high school could tell you that!

And that, of course, is the "logical" conclusion to an argument built on this foundation of "a little knowledge."

The dangers of a little knowledge, however, can usually be overcome with the application of a little thought.

What, for example, is the meaning of "dog" in English? Domesticated canine often kept as a pet? Sure. Ugly female? Oh, yeah. To follow someone persistently? Uh-oh, I think I see where this is going. How about: to chase with dogs, or a kind of sausage (hot dog, corn dog), or a really bad movie or novel, or feet (dogs)?

So, you say that the Spanish word for dog is always "perro"; is that your final answer?

How about the English phrase "get down"? Start or make to feel depressed? Move an object or oneself from a higher position in space to a lower one? Obtain soft feathers? Leave the table? Commit (an idea or thoughts) to paper? Boogie??

Even just "down" by itself: Eat or drink quickly. The aforementioned soft feathers. Depressed. Another attempt at moving the ball 10 yards. To knock something over. An amount paid at the beginning of a purchase by loan. Approximately half the answers in a crossword puzzle. The condition of a computer, or of a computer system, experiencing problems and, therefore, unavailable for use. In particle physics, a d quark.

Clearly, even just considering English, most words have many meanings and uses; some just two or three, but others, hundreds or even thousands. These meanings and uses have developed over centuries of use by English speakers, frequently without any influence from outside languages, and certainly without any concern for whether a newly created usage had a one-to-one equivalent in all the other languages of the world.

To translate between two languages, then, requires more than a great dictionary. It requires someone who knows enough English, for example, to understand the real meaning of "dog" or "get down" in a particular sentence, and who also knows enough Spanish to choose a Spanish expression which will capture and express that particular intended meaning faithfully.

When you hire better translators, your translation will be a more accurate and more faithful reflection of the original text. Your translation and your original will say the same thing, have the same meaning, and produce the same effect in the reader. With less expensive, less qualified translators, your original document will say one thing, but your translation will usually say something quite different!!

And as far as differences in rates go, translators, like anyone else, charge what they can. The ones who charge more have clients who are happy to pay that amount for the higher levels of expertise, quality, and service that brings. The ones who charge less either do not realize they could charge more or, more likely, are not offering their clients the expertise, quality, and service that would allow them to do so. Fortunately, translators in this position can, and often do, improve their knowledge, quality, and service as they continue in the profession, and are able to raise their rates accordingly. Differences in rates may not necessarily reflect differences in quality, but most of us understand that there is a relationship between the two. Not all $15,000 cars or $80 hotel rooms are identical, for example, but the $50,000 car or the $300 hotel room is probably much better! (And the same goes for translations.)

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Friday, July 6, 2007

How not to translate

I am just back from an interpreting appointment at a Providence Health System hospital. While there, I noticed they had some brochures in Spanish. On one it says, right on the cover, "Usted sentirá la calidad de nuestra atención," which is meant to translate "A Caring Difference You Can Feel." In fact, it really can mean, appropriately enough, "you will feel the quality of our care"; unfortunately, it can also easily be interpreted to mean "you will regret the quality of our care"!

If I were Providence, that is not something I would want on the front of my brochure.

Inside the brochure, there are other questionable translations, each revealing a translator who knows a lot of Spanish and how to use a dictionary, but also revealing a translator who does not know how things are normally said in Spanish.

"Health care" has been translated as "cuidado a la salud," which is not normal Spanish; "atención médica" is.

"Administración apropiada de su dolor" is probably meant to translate "appropriate management of your pain," but the choice of "administración" (instead of "manejo" or "control") makes it sound like the pain will be appropriately inflicted, not appropriately managed. I know that, if I were a patient, I would be surprised to learn that I had a right to have my pain appropriately inflicted!

Signs in the hospital itself referred to the "facilidad médica," which makes no sense in Spanish unless you are saying someone has a real "medical knack," whatever that is. "Medical facility" is either "instalación médica" or, far more commonly, "centro médico."

This is the kind of translation you get when the translator takes the English term and creates a "Spanish" term by translating the English words. While that is certainly a lot faster and easier (and therefore cheaper) than doing any research, the result is a term that no Spanish speaker will understand, much less be able to decipher, without knowing enough English to piece together what meaning was intended. If your Spanish-speaking patients know that much English, then they don't need your Spanish brochure! And if they do not know that much English, then they will not understand your Spanish brochure!

Naturally, if you are having something translated into Spanish, you want Spanish speakers to be able to understand it...and without having to know enough English to correctly guess what you intended to say. That is why it is not enough to have someone "bilingual" translate your material into "Spanish." You need a professional translator who can translate your message into real Spanish that your real Spanish-speaking audience will really be able to understand.

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Friday, June 15, 2007

How to judge translation quality

When you send out a document to be translated, how can you know that the translation that comes back to you is a good one?

Unfortunately, this is a bit of a stumper, as it is for so many other services whose relative quality you may be unable to judge. How do you know you have picked the best dentist? The best doctor? The best teacher? A bestselling book on how to market one's professional services carries this telling title: "Selling the Invisible." In a nutshell, it says that clients who cannot judge the quality of a service will judge its quality by other factors, such as by the quality of customer service they receive. Does the doctor really listen to you? Is the dental office staff friendly? Does the teacher return your calls? These may be entirely unrelated to the quality of the professional service, but clients with no other knowledge on which to base their judgments will assume that someone who is professional and attentive towards them must be just as professional and attentive to the quality of the services he or she provides. This may be "mostly" true, but it is an indirect relationship at best. There are also clear counterexamples, such as those individuals who are absolute geniuses at what they do, but who have no people skills whatsoever.

To produce a high-quality translation requires so much knowledge, art, and skill that the people most able to judge a translation's quality are, no surprise, other translators. Hand me a translation from Spanish to English (or English to Spanish) and the original document, and I can tell you pretty quickly whether it is a good translation, a great translation, or a terrible one. Hand me a translation from a different language pair and, in most cases, I can tell you little to absolutely nothing about how well it has been done. This is a major reason that I work only with Spanish < > English translations and translators; I want to be absolutely sure of the quality of the work my company produces.

Chances are, however, that you are not a translator. How, then, can you judge the quality of the translation you are buying? It is not easy, but it is possible. There are other ways to judge translation quality.

The best way, in my opinion, would be to find a reputable translator to compare the translation to the original. In my experience, the best translators tend to be those who: 1) translate only into their native language, 2) have an extensive educational background (graduate degree or equivalent), 3) are not willing to work for average or below-average rates (the quality of their work is such they do not have to), and 4) demonstrate a commitment to the translation profession by their participation in professional organizations and by having sought, and received, some kind of professional certification.

This reputable translator can judge the quality of a translation for you, showing you where the translation leaves out information that was in the original, adds information, changes the tone or even the meaning(!!), introduces grammar or spelling errors, sounds like Tarzan (a common problem when a translator works into a language other than his or her native language), or in some other way distorts or disfigures the message in your original document. Ninety percent of translations by market-rate or below-market-rate translators will usually commit several of these errors in a single translation.

Even the best translators are human, making occasional mistakes they do not detect. This is why the best translations are the ones that begin with a high-quality translation of the original and are then carefully proofread by the original translator and thoroughly edited by a second reputable translator (in collaboration with the original translator) to polish away any imperfections that may have crept in.

The only reason I can think of to use a different method of judging translation quality would be to save money. However, given the stakes, monetary or otherwise, that are often riding on the quality of a translation, this could prove to be a false economy. If what is at stake for you is important or valuable in any way, then it should be worth a half hour to an hour of a translator's time for you to be sure you are getting it right. Myself, I am glad to offer this kind of translation evaluation service for free, knowing that most translations are poorly done and that, by helping someone see whatever lapses in quality there might be in the current translations, I may gain a new client and, if the current translations are already of good quality, then I have at least performed a public service, not just for that person, but also for the other translator, the translation profession in general and, perhaps most importantly, for everyone who must rely on those translations.

Less perfect ways of judging translation quality are:
1) Asking someone who is not a translator to judge
2) Judging translation quality by the translator's experience, education, and/or certifications

The problem with the first option is that most people will not find someone with the necessary qualifications for the task, but will instead seek out anyone they happen to know who is "bilingual" or a "native speaker." I use quotes around these terms because they can cover a whole range of language abilities. Often, in the U.S. at least, someone who is described as bilingual or as a native speaker either studied (or majored in) the language in college or is a "heritage speaker"—someone who learned the language, while in the U.S., by hearing relatives speak it but, having never studied the language formally, is often unfamiliar with native usage outside of the U.S., or even with proper spelling and grammar! While either could be described as bilingual or a native speaker, neither has, in most cases, anywhere near the background necessary to be a competent judge of translation quality. However, given that some people think that high school Spanish students are an economical way to get free "translations", you could certainly do worse. You could also do much better. If you can not afford to pay a professional, at the very least find someone who was college-educated (ideally to the graduate level) in the country where most of the readers of your translation are from, still lives in or makes frequent visits to that country, is a native speaker of the language of the translation, and is also a highly fluent speaker of the language of the original document.

For an overview of the different levels of translation ability, as defined by the U.S. Government, see: http://www.govtilr.org/AdoptedILRTranslationGuidelines.htm
If you are in a hurry, you can skip down to the "Performance Level" section at the bottom. Most professional (if not reputable) translators whose work I have seen fall into the categories "Limited Performance Level 2" or "Limited Performance Level 2+." The highest level is "Professional Performance Level 5." For a more detailed treatment, read the short preface, too.

The second option is to use the translator's experience, education, and/or certifications as a way to judge translation quality. It must be admitted that these are all rather indirect. Even ATA corporate members themselves, when surveyed (The ATA Chronicle, April 2007), said they rely on other measures (especially their company's own translation tests) more than they rely on ATA certification. It is certainly true that some of the best translators I know are not certified, and some of the certified translators whose work I have seen I would not hire. Experience, education, and certification can not be considered guarantees of translation ability.

If I had to pick, say, an English-to-Japanese translator, how would I find a good one? First, I would go to http://www.atanet.org, click on "Find a Translator or Interpreter," click on "Search ATA's online directory for individual translators and interpreters," and click on "Advanced Search." There, I would choose "English to Japanese," "Show all members," "Undergraduate," native language: "Japanese." This produces a list of 124 translators, so I would begin using additional criteria to narrow the search. Limiting the search further to translators living in Japan produces only 5 results, 2 of which are professional enough to list "English into Japanese" as their only language combination. Choosing, instead, to limit my search to ATA-certified English-to-Japanese translators with graduate degrees produces 21 results, 12 of which are either professional enough to list "English into Japanese" as their only language combination or good enough to also be certified in "Japanese into English." I would read all of these profiles carefully, request translation samples from three of them (experienced translators will be able to produce these readily), hire each of the three to help me evaluate the samples from the other two (so two independent opinions on each sample), and use that information to help me decide which one to hire for my English-to-Japanese translations. End result, I get a far better idea of the quality of work each can produce than I could ever have otherwise, each of them gets paid for an hour or two of work, I get to evaluate how professional and easy to work with each one is and, ideally, one of them gains a new client.

During this whole process, I would also keep my ears open for any mention that the translator works with an editor. It can be especially helpful if the editor is a reputable Japanese-to-English translator (the opposite language combination). This way, the native English-speaking translator can check to make sure that the native Japanese-speaking translator has correctly understood, and therefore correctly translated, everything in the original English document.

If all this begins to sound very complicated, it is just because it really is. Anything less, however, puts you at greater risk of having your translation have a different meaning than your original document. If your business, your personal life, or anything else, depends on your translation having the same meaning as your original, then you can not be too careful!

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Friday, January 26, 2007

"The well-being law animal will include sanctions for that mistreats to the mascots"

Nowadays anyone can translate anything, simply by putting it in a text box and pushing the "Translate" button! Type in "How are you?" and out comes "¿Cómo eres?" Easy! Unfortunately, the English question "How are you?" is asking how someone is feeling today, and the Spanish question "¿Cómo eres?" is asking someone what kind of a person he or she is (e.g., smart, lazy, tall, blond). The computer cannot tell the difference, and luckily for it, neither can you!

Here is a fun one: "They are bored." The Spanish "translation"? "Se agujerean." Does it mean what you think? Probably not. It means "They make holes in each other"! That is taking "boring" to a whole new level, and not the one you usually mean when you say that someone is bored. (To be fair, "Se agujerean." can also mean "Holes are made in them," but that is still not the first interpretation that comes to my mind when I hear "They are bored.")

I recently caught a major telecommunications company advertising for bilingual employees who could generate sales "activamente solicitando nuevas ventas del interior de los clientes" ("actively requesting new sales from clients' interiors"). I would not want to be on either side of that transaction!

When you use machine translation (such as Google Translate: http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en), more often than not, your translation will be riddled with serious errors, meanings will change unpredictably, and your reputation with other-language speakers will hardly come out unscathed, either.

Want to really put a machine translator to the test? Here are two easy ways:

1) Cut and paste a couple paragraphs of foreign-language text and ask the machine translator to translate it into English for you.

2) Cut and paste, or type in, a couple paragraphs of text in your native language, then: a) have the machine translator translate it into a second language and b) cut and paste its translation into the box and have it translate the translation back into your native language.

Of these two tests, the first one is more fair (to the machine translator) and provides a truer picture of its abilities. The translate/back-translate test has the disadvantage of undoing some of the translation errors and compounding others, so the end result will, in places, not reveal errors that were made in the first step, and in other places will exaggerate or magnify errors from that step. Using either test, though, you will be able to appreciate some of the many limitations of machine translations.

For a real translation, you still need a real translator:

La ley de bienestar animal incluirá sanciones para quien maltrate a las mascotas

"Animal Welfare Law Will Include Penalties for Those Who Mistreat Pets"

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