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.

"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"