Great Tranzlation Bloopers... and How to Avoid Them

(Hi, I'm back after the Pesach/Passover break - it's nice to be with you again - Naomi)

The favorite, and perhaps official sport, of translators is spotting the hilarious translations bloopers that often appear when texts are produced by translators who either don't know one of the languages in the pair or who think that translation involves rendering the text literally word-by-word.

If this sport had rules, I think that Chinese product descriptions and all machine translations would be out of bounds - they are just too easy to spot. Perhaps, the challenge should be rather to find one of these that was actually any good.

OK, we all need a laugh, so here are just a few choice bloopers:

In a Paris hotel elevator: Please leave your values at the front desk.
In the reception of a Romanian hotel: The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.
In an African newspaper: A new swimming pool is rapidly taking shape since the contractors have thrown in the bulk of their workers.
In a Belgrade hotel elevator: To move the cabin, push button for wishing floor. If the cabin should enter more persons, each one should press a number of wishing floor. Driving is then going alphabetically by national order.
In a hotel in Athens: Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 daily.

Or my favorite in the hotel collection:
In an Acapulco hotel: The manager has personally passed all the water served here.

OK, so we've laughed. That should put us in a good frame of mind for addressing a serious question - what can we self-respecting professionals do to avoid ending up on a blooper list? Based on the fact that we are all native speakers of our target languages, I'm assuming that none of us come could up with anything so very ridiculous as the examples above. But we are only human and we can not totally avoid errors, and these can sometimes be costly, embarrassing and detrimental to our careers.

Firstly, I do want to emphasize that even the world's greatest translators make mistakes - be they in grammar, comprehension, cultural reference or understanding of the concepts behind the material. Clients who expect a flawless finished product are out of line.

My philosophy is that we should aim for an unusually low rate of errors, and this over time will contribute to a good reputation, even if one or two clients along the way will be unsatisfied.

Here are a few practices that will reduce the incidence of errors:

• Set the text aside for overnight before the final proofread (if the deadline permits)
  
• Run a spell-check immediately before sending (many translators don't do this because they rely on those green and red lines in MS Word - but I promise you, you'll find things you didn't see with spell-check)
• If the text is going to be printed or put on a website, tell the client that you want to see the laid-out version before it is printed or goes live. Errors you did not see before will become apparent in a new format, besides the fact that new errors frequently creep in in the formatting process.
  
• Make sure that the client understands the importance of proofreading by another "pair of eyes".
  

However, I have learned that even if we allow ourselves a small margin of error, we should extremely careful that the mistakes do not turn up in prominent places, such as book jackets, magazine covers, title pages, headlines, captions, headings, and, last but not least, the client's name or vital stats. Mistakes buried in the text will frequently not be noticed, but in any of the above locations... heads may roll.

These should all be checked and rechecked before sending the document.