This isn’t transcription, where a verbatim presentation is often par for the course. Other cultures have their own sense of what is considered insulting-or gauche-with spoken or written language, so develop your awareness of a country’s etiquette in various situations and be sensitive about the words and phrases you use. Japanese business culture has various levels of discourse there is polite language and super-polite language, depending on the hierarchy of the individuals involved. What was less well-documented was the Japanese government’s aversion to the president’s demands regarding imports of US-made cars.

In 1992, President George Bush made headlines for a rather unfortunate vomiting incident at a Japanese state dinner. Useful for an entire document? Not as much. Useful for an unknown word or phrase? Yes. Yet he has a wonderful quote where he laments, “Sometimes I just don’t understand human behavior.” That line is a great illustration of the fact that machine translators are woefully inept at deciphering human meaning. In the Star Wars saga, C-3PO boasts of being fluent in six million forms of communication. Note: While we’re mentioning online translation sites, it should be added that these should be used sparingly. It may not have been cost-feasible for the script translator on the Star Wars job to double check every line, but seeing how the title is a pretty important part of the advertising process, it might have behooved him to throw “backstroke” into an online translator and make sure is came out with “revenge” on the other side-or at least something close to that original word. George Lucas’ sprawling space opera was now apparently a swimmer’s instructional video titled Backstroke of the West. The film script had been translated into Chinese, then back into English subtitles, with questionable results. Shortly after Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was released on DVD, an Internet blogger posted screenshots from a version purchased in Shanghai. This is one instance where using an online translation site like Google Translate or WordReference may help see if you captured the original phrase properly. It is helpful sometimes-particularly for a turn of phrase that you’re translating for the first time-to check your work. Alas, the German translator he employed used an ill-fated literal translation of liechensack, and rather than encouraging hikers to “bring your own backpack,” they were invited to “bring your own body bag.” A glance through an English dictionary could have kept business alive! 3. Imagine an Outward Bound proprietor in the Bavarian Alps, wondering why his clientele of English-speaking hikers has dropped off precipitously since his last marketing campaign. Once you’ve figured out the actual translation from one language to another, the monolingual dictionary helps make sure there aren’t any uncomfortable nuances in the language you’ve gone to. But monolingual dictionaries are equally as important. Check the MeaningĪ conversion dictionary for the languages you’re shuttling between is a must. It’s not necessarily just a matter of how the information is broken up into sections these similar documents may have certain phraseology that sounds more natural to the reader that you can substitute in lieu of a more clunky literal translation.

The layout of a quarterly report on stock performance may look a certain way in Belgium, but American corporations may find it easier to take in the information another way. Translating an apartment lease form? Medical reports? A will and trust? It’s helpful not only to know the words involved, but the typical format and flow of a similar document. These are a few habits for translators of the written word to develop so that even when the words change, the intent does not. The eventual reader doesn’t have the luxury of gauging the tone of a speaker’s voice or watching expressions. Translators go a long way towards restoring our connections, but written translation has its own particular challenges that spoken translation does not. Ever since the Tower of Babel, we’ve been struggling to communicate with each other.

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