I have proposed to a friend of mine in Germany that he and I pair up, he does the German into English part, and I polish it to either British or American usage. I have no idea who it is teaching english over there, but every single German I have ever corresponded with or played in an MMORPG with has made the same mistakes.
Who’s idea is it for intense activities or intense experience to be ‘intensive’? And we don’t want to go into thighs/tights. Though I suppse for gamers today “Let us view upon the village of” has a certain je ne sais quois…
English to Spanish, occasionally Spanish to English. Also Catalan to the other two.
I’d rather not do the other two to Catalan because I’ve got some problems with Catalan spelling (there’s two details I always seem to get wrong).
I’ve also done translations from German and French (technical stuff which I understood, with someone else that could review it, and which wasn’t intended for any kind of “official” use). All my interpreting experience has been person-to-person and in sort’a-emergency settings, things like one of the warehouse guys dragging a very nervous-looking, very large German to the lab by a shirtsleeve and saying “he only speaks foreign and I only speak national and we have to do something strange with his paperwork, can you try to explain?” I’m not sure “Germanglish to Spanish, with gestures” quite counts, you know? But it worked! (It’s amazing the calming effect a white coat has on very nervous, very large truck drivers)
Convoluted grammar can be tough, obviously, but my worst job ever had no grammar at all: the Yellow Pages, which I translated earlier this year. Not the actual entries, of course, but all of the goods and services categories, all the town names and all of the street names in the country, in one big Excel sheet. Did you know that Israel has 13,571 different street names?
It was, to put it mildly, a bit of a slog. Fortunately, it’s the kind of job one person has to do once, and then never again.
Russian and Swedish to English, for the most part, but dabble in general French and Italian texts as well. (Considering I got a degree in Russian from Georgetown, it’s about damn time I tried putting it to some use!)
Spanish to English, almost entirely.
I always turn down English-Spanish but if the client insists and it is a fairly straightforward text, I’ll accept it. I still need to get a native Spanish speaker to edit it.
I’ve also done French to English but it has to be very straightforward or well within my areas of specialist knowledge.