QUALITY IN THE RACE FOR TIME!

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Sacrifice Quality in the race for time?

I don’t think so! Having handled and spoken with colleagues who have seen their share of projects with large volumes, I can confidently say that Quality need not be sacrificed in the pursuit of deadlines. “They are much like other jobs actually. Granted, we had to put in a lot of extra hours, a lot of in-house checking to ensure nothing was missed, but all in all it wasn’t that bad at all ” says my friend and former colleague Clare, when talking about one of these ‘infamous’ jobs. Clearly, she isn’t fazed by big numbers or tight TATs. Let’s talk about why.

First of all, why is a tight deadline so frowned upon?

• Just because you pay a rush fee*, it doesn’t mean that a translator gets another set of arms! He can only do what he can do. If its 2000 words per day is his work capacity, that’s what he can effectively accomplish. If he pushes himself much more than that, there are prone to be errors.
• The Editing/proofreading stage is generally skipped owing to the time constraints. So mistranslations, omissions, inconsistencies, punctuations and so on, which need to be detected and weeded out in this stage, are left behind.

*A rush fee isn’t paid to get linguists to miraculously start spewing out words in double speed! The rush fee is for the following reasons.

• To compensate for time spent over holidays.
• To allow for retainer fees; when huge rolling volumes are expected and the linguist has to be on call as soon as they arrive.
• To cover expenses of allocating a dedicated PM for the task.

How is this addressed?

• It is best not to push a linguist beyond his capacity. Agencies generally have the capacity to distribute the job with other linguists. But doesn’t this spell consistency disaster? No it needn’t. Setting up a good Translation Memory and glossaries, and automating QA checks can eliminate inconsistencies to a large extent.
• The QA process is imperative in these projects. That’s the point of Project Managers. Good PMs do all they can to ensure that the mechanical aspects of the translation are thoroughly checked and rectified. A meticulous Visual Check roots out punctuation errors, and obvious omissions. Where the target language is known to at least one of the PMs, as in the case of the Japanese to English project, a more thorough Quality Check for grammar, spelling errors etc. is carried out. With files coming in on a rolling basis, the PMs are able to get in the time to perform these checks before the files go out to the client.

Looking for ways to offer value to our customers in terms of quality is an obsession with many of us and these projects present the perfect opportunity; so yes, I love meeting the challenge of maintaining quality despite tight deadlines. Do you?

Quality in the race for time!

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Translation is Serious Business!

Translation is Serious Business!

Of course we have all had a good laugh at the translation goof ups that have come our way. That the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan “finger-lickin’ good” came out as “eat your fingers off” when translated into Chinese was a hoot. When it was reported that a sign outside a Hong Kong tailor’s shop said “Ladies may have a fit upstairs”, we giggled. But Translation blunders ain’t always a laughing matter. Read on to see some horrifying consequences of taking Translation lightly.

18-year-old Willie Ramirez was admitted to a Florida hospital in a comatose state. The paramedics and doctors were told by his Spanish speaking friends and family that Willie was probably “intoxicado”, meaning that he was probably suffering from food poisoning as he had eaten something outside.  Translation by a bilingual staff member resulted in translating “intoxicado” as “intoxicated.” He was actually suffering from an intracerebral hemorrhage, but the doctors proceeded as if he were suffering from an intentional drug overdose, which can lead to some of the symptoms he displayed. Because of the delay in treatment, Ramirez was left quadriplegic. He received a malpractice settlement of $71 million but he never did walk again.

I’m sure there was much more to the bombing in Hiroshima, but reports have been around that Good Translation Might Have Prevented Hiroshima. It is said that when Truman, Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam calling for the Japanese to surrender, the Japanese responded with the word ”mokusatsu,” which was to be interpreted as “No comment. We’re still thinking about it.” The word “mokusatsu” can also mean “we’re ignoring it in contempt,” which was what was conveyed to the Allied Powers. This could have been the flint that lit the fire. Talk about words felling a nation!

So down with translation then? J. W. Goethe once said “Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.”

 

The importance of translation was made evident once again, in the recent murder case of Deisy Garcia and her young daughters. Deisy had filed a police report with the NYPD in May of last year, that she feared that her abusive husband would kill her and her daughters. She filed another complaint in November. Her complaint was in Spanish, and was never translated into English for further review! Deisy and her two daughters were murdered by her husband on January 18^th 2014.

There are a many more such instances to attest to the tragedy caused when translation isn’t accorded due diligence. I could go on but I’m sure we get the picture. Erroneous translation can mean losing clients, lawsuits and lives! Sure, anyone who knows a language can tell you what’s being said, but to convey the meaning in a clear, natural and accurate manner is what it takes to be a good translator.

Know of any more translation blunders with disastrous consequences? Share them with us.

As Wise (?) as an Owl (?)

 

 

To a Native English Speaker, this idiom is as old as Methuselah (or the hills, if you prefer.) This has been drummed into our vocabulary right from pre-school. ‘Is an owl really wise?’ is NOT what we are going to discuss here. Piqued your curiosity anyway? You could check this link on that topic.

What we ARE going to talk about is the dilemma translators, particularly in a few Indic languages, have to face when asked to translate this idiom. ‘Mr. Z is as wise as an owl. He seems to know everything” might not go down too well with Mr. Z if this was said in Hindi or Kannada. The equivalent word for owl in these and a few other languages is used as a slang to mean ‘a fool’! Daniel Mendelsohn in a recent post in the New York Times wrote:  “Every text is, to some extent, a bafflement to its translator, because every language, like every writer, has characteristics that can’t be “carried across” — which is what “translate” means — into another tongue, another culture. (Think of words like “chutzpah” and “chic.”) Traduttore traditore, the Italians pun: “The translator is a betrayer.” Yet translations must be made. “

Yes, despite these challenges translations must and are being made. Translation Studies have brought out a number of techniques of which we can discuss three today:

Adaptation: This is a technique by which a phrase or term having cultural connotations exclusively understood in the Source language is replaced by a phrase that has a corresponding cultural connotation in the Target language.  Did you know that Tintin’s dog Snowy is originally named Milou in French? Milou was a contraction of the name of the author’s first girlfriend. Imagine Snowy named as Marie-Louise! Anyway, Snowy named after his snowy white coat is easier to comprehend to the English audience.   

Reformulation or Equivalence: In this technique, you completely change the phrase or term to reflect the true context. A classic example is the movie “The Sound of Music”. In Spanish the name of the movie was rendered “La Novicia Rebelde” (The Rebellious Novice). No Sound, no music (albeit only in the name)! But it definitely fit the plot of the movie.

Explicitation: This technique does increase the word count in the target text, but most often this is required for the meaning to be conveyed clearly. In this technique, you would have to introduce an explanation into the Target language text to convey what is said implicitly in the Source text.

These are some technique that you can use. Drawing from these, you could either eliminate the use of ‘owl’ and replace it with an object that is culturally better suited in the target language, reformulate the phrase completely and add in something that conveys the idea of how wise Mr. Z is or you could leave out a comparison altogether. A Hindi linguist suggested we keep it plain and simple: “Mr. Z is extremely wise. He seems to know everything”

I would be glad to know how you would tackle this sentence. Write back!