Yeah, I agree you don’t need to be a native speaker to translate well.
However, I think you can get a very good level of translation with a combination of a not-too-good translator and a native speaker of the target language (at least for things like instruction books. Less so for literature or poetry)
Most native speakers with basic writing skills can take pretty badly translated language and, as long as they can figure out the gist, output reasonable and correct language in their own language.
Like, my Spanish is pretty bad. High school almost two decades ago and brief international trips since then. But when I was in Peru, I kept laughing at how bad the English translations were in some museums. I could have easily made them far better using the original Spanish (which I could puzzle through slowly) and the bad English as inputs.
You can certainly learn to do that in a language that’s not your native language, but native speakers have already learned it.
But that person would presumably tell you how to write it correctly. Which SHOULD mean that you also know the original language so you can be sure that you’re not just guessing at the intended syntax based on a proven inaccurate translation. Otherwise someone could be “cleaning” it to be even more inaccurate.
My wife does packaging & catalog translation for a company that sells to Latin America & Canada (and, of course, Spanish speakers in the US) and it’s really just a question of money. A lot of companies are happy with “good enough” from someone already on staff who can muddle through with two semesters of college courses and Google Translate. Proper translators who understand grammar and regionalisms and all that stuff cost money. Money that a lot of companies aren’t interested in spending because good enough usually is good enough – no one is going to die or sue because the instruction sheet for their USB hub is laughable.
Hunh,I did not know that about the Nova. I had heard it in a college marketing class as the article said.
I didn’t say that Joanie loves chichi things led to high ratings, I said that it led to embarrassment. The US military channel is available pretty much throughout Seoul. American names were phonetically transcribed and Chachi was phonetically translated into a close homonym for penis (jaji) as the article says. Add to this the fact that the Korean the character for the “ch” sound is pretty fucking close to the Korean character for the “j” sound. Additionally, the two sound pretty close if you are not paying attention.
that little tick at the top is the only thing that differentiates “ch” from “j” I think they changed the name of Scott Baio’s character.
While the claim about the Nova is false, the Mitsubishi Pajero is sold as the Montero in the US and Spanish-speaking countries because “pajero” means “masturbator” in Spanish slang.
I once saw a Pajero in a French-speaking African country with a Spanish-speaking colleague and we both had a good laugh.
This. Didn’t read the instructions when I was 8. Only refer to them for LOLs now. But, as a draftsman who is also OCD, my instructions were magnificent. But not magnificent enough for our assembly foreman, Mohammed, who either needed to be walked through the process (“There’s an exploded view and step-by-step instructions, for fuck’s sake!”) after he used MBFH (Mohammed’s Big Fucking Hammer) to try to make it work. But he wouldn’t read them.
One Ramadan he suggested that I (same age) would benefit from a month-long fast. True, but I’m the one who buried him 20 years ago.
I bought one of these on Amazon Prime Day or whatever (thanks to the thread adoring the thing here on the SDMB). It’s great. But for being “designed by Canadians,” the manual is full of obvious Chinese translations. And after five years in China, I’ve got a lot of experience with things that are technically correct but just awkward in English. The manual is full of them.
This is a product that’s trying to appear Canadian rather than Chinese, and presumably the principals are in Canada. They couldn’t vet their manual with a local?
I am bilingual in Japanese and English so I’m occasionally asked to translate things. It’s absolutely the most difficult thing to do. Translation isn’t about replacing words, because words in different languages don’t correspond 1 to 1. The word “run” has 31 definitions listed in Webster’s, and for each one, there are several possible corresponding Japanese words depending on context, formality, tense, etc. For someone like me, who isn’t trained as a translator, the only way to translate it is to understand the original text 100%, try to think about the content rather than the words, then switch my brain to the other language and try to describe that content. Except my brain is still thinking about the sentence structure in the original language so it comes out wrong.
I suspect professional translators and interpreters have so much training and experience that they can write/speak a translation with only superficial understanding of the material. It’s a specialized skill.
And you can’t just take a bad translation and clean up the grammar. I’ve tried to do that too - a Japanese colleague would give me the English translation they’ve written and ask me to clean up their English. Every time I end up having to ask to see their original Japanese text. Because the problem with a poor translation isn’t the phrasing or grammar - the problem is that you can’t understand what it’s trying to say.
This is exactly my experience in Thailand. Working at the English-language newspapers there, it was amazing how poor some of the reporters’ English was, and many was the time when they would fight tooth and nail against my or another native speaker’s corrections of their goofiness. A Kiwi (New Zealander) of my acquaintance once worked in a language school where the head teacher was a Thai lady, much respected after being on the faculty for 25 years, who greeted everyone each day with, “Goose morning!” The same Kiwi later taught English at a rather prestigious university, where if a Hi-So (high society) student’s English was corrected too much, and said student objected, the teacher actually had to have a session with a staff psychiatrist to determine why he wanted to be so domineering.
I actually did this sort of thing as my first real job in Japan back in the early 90s. I worked for a Japanese documentation company. We had freelance translators, but I did the editing and proofreading of the English material.
There are a number of factors which contribute.
First, worldwide most people don’t understand enough about foreign languages for this to be on many people’s radar. The company which develops the products is mostly concerned about their product. Manuals are pretty low priority, even manuals in the native language before any translation begins.
For small companies, typically, the manuals will be created out of house. They hire some agency, which will hire some subcontractors who will have some free lance person do the translation. It’s really hit-or-miss. The graphic people don’t speak the foreign language, nor does anyone is the purchasing department of the client. Maybe someone in the client’s marketing department went to college in America, but they’ve got their own job to do and as scr4 noted, it’s difficult.
The jobs are rushed. Someone will often strip out the words to be translated and throw them into an Excel spreadsheet. You do your best to try to guess what the context is. The amount of money doesn’t allow for an infinite number of back-and-forths with the client, even if you have access to the client.
On one job, the agency kept coming back with questions which made no sense. Their client wasn’t happy with me, I was frustrated with them. Finally, the end client demanded a meeting.
On the appointed date, I went to my client, had some coffee and then we went to their client and had some more coffee. However, this wasn’t the end client. My customer’s customer was a subcontractor for an advertising company which was contracting from a publisher or something. This being Japan, representatives of all the middle companies had to go along. Four stops and an insane amount of caffeine later, about six of us finally met the end client.
I was charging a reasonable $30 a page. My customer was charging $40, their customers more then their customers even more. I shutter to think how much the manufacturer was being fleeced for, but, it wasn’t cheap.
Almost everyone I met in the industry was self taught. There were some people who had extensive training as simultaneous translators, but everyone was just winging it, myself included. I had an engineering degree.
As scr4 noted, there isn’t a word-for-word relationship between the languages. It’s interesting to hear my native Chinese speaking children talk in Japanese. You “open” a light switch, for example.
If your company is doing the the entire manual, which we did, then you can spend the time to get it right – if you have the resources. – because you can see the context. If you’re an expat with a few hours to spare at night, you’ll do almost as badly as a non-native because you would be trying to translate without context.
We did have Western freelance translators and checker, but they mostly did that full-time. I only met a very few who had another job. It’s too hard to contact them and ask questions for to verify their schedule. Their boss doesn’t want them taking calls at work, of course.
It seems likely that either the company really has basically nothing to do with Canada (Perhaps a Chinese company contracted two Canadians to design part of something?), or one of their Chinese suppliers has subcontracted out to a really low-quality replacement that hasn’t even manage to copy the manual successfully.
Um, no. That’s not a ‘failed attempt’ at anything, that’s a general truth (with just enough exceptions to prove the rule).
A major part of my career over the past 25 years has been running bilingual (Japanese and English) publication departments. I will hire anyone capable of producing professional-level translation. The number of native-level Japanese speakers claiming to be able to translate into English outnumber their native English counterparts by a factor of 10 or more. And yet, after 25 years, I can count on two fingers the number of native Japanese translators I’ve found that are able to translate into English at a professional level in my field. A handful more were good enough to act as checkers.
Is it impossible to translate into your second language? No. Is it very unlikely? Yes. Are you highly likely to be overestimating your skill at translating into your second language? Yes.
If you are a translator, that you have a native-level understanding of the source text is a given. Far more important is writing ability in the translator’s native language. This should be obvious: Millions of people in America speak English as their native language, but they don’t all have the writing skill of a Nobel laureate.
OMG no. This is a million times wrong. A badly translated document can not be ‘fixed’ by someone that doesn’t understand what the source text is trying to say.
A badly translated document potentially could be fixed by a skilled translator with access to the source text, but that would a) still probably be worse than a document properly translated from the start, b) would take longer than simply translating it correctly, and c) would end up costing more than simply translating it correctly.
Wow, that’s beyond reasonable; rates were a lot higher back in the early 90s (I started out in the late 80s). That’s about a paragraph of work for me now.
I don’t know about manuals, but an awful lot of English speakers decide to get their bodies permanently decorated with foreign-language phrases that make no sense at all.
http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ has many, many tattoos that mean nothing at all like what the person they’re wearing thinks they mean.
This blogpost shows someone who thought their shirt said “Blue Lives Matter.” It…didn’t.
A couple I found today. Again, this is not about translation, just proofreading. You don’t need to be an expert in two languages to fix these glaring errors (capitalization per the original):
Most of the rest of their page is fine, with proper grammar and structure. For example:
Yes, they aren’t huge, world-ending mistakes. They won’t cut into their sales. Hardly anyone cares. But is it really so hard to fix these? You’re telling me it no company could find someone to fix these? Or just that they don’t want to?
Imagine you are a manager producing a product that will be exported to several countries. You hire several people who have certificates or resumes to show that they are experienced translators. You give them the English manual, and later you receive the French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese translations.
What do you do now? Assume that these translations are all poor quality, and hire native speakers from each country to proofread and edit them? How do you know those people are actually native speakers? Are these people familiar enough with your product that they know when the translation is incorrect?
Or do you just print the translation and be done with it? After all, they were produced by translators.
The thing is, “fluent” covers a lot of ground, and people who are truly, “completely” fluently bilingual are relatively rare (and very expensive to employ). Assuming you’re stuck with unequal levels in two languages, the ideal situation is for the translator to be more fluent in the destination language. (And even among fluent writers in a single language, some are much better than others.)
Unfortunately, that’s rarely what you’ve got: the available resources will usually be more fluent in the local language than the destination one. The rest of the world generally learns some English because of the American economic influence on the world, but the opposite is not true (most Americans are uninterested in learning other languages), which makes the resource pool even more one-sided. So finding a (for example) very fluent English speaker/writer who is also competent in Mandarin in Beijing is going to be much more difficult than the opposite: a quick look at job sites shows that that’s an incredibly valuable skill (and hence costly to obtain).
So the next best option is the OP’s: you could find a native speaker to proofread after the translation, but that’s two people involved rather than one, and thus higher in cost, and most people don’t think of “translation” as being a two step process. So only the largest/richest of companies are going to bother, especially since most people don’t care or even find it amusing.
