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Feedback by Absolute Translations’ reviewers on a translation sample of approx. 500 words

Norwegian

–         Everything I’ve read sounds translated and some of it might as well have been translated using Google Translate. The language is Norwegian, but the syntax is English. [Norwegian examples provided]

–         Simple errors that should be easy to avoid, like: [Norwegian examples provided]

–         Phrases that look like they’ve been translated by Google, like: [Norwegian examples provided]

–          A truly skilled translator would never use the word “ufordervet” to translate unspoiled nature/landscapes, as “fordervet” actually means spoiled (rotten) as in food that’s gone bad.

–          The quality of the translation as a whole is way below what would be acceptable for a commercial text, and my suggestion is that the client has someone do the translation again from scratch rather than correcting the current translations. I think the result would better and the cost lower.

Danish

–          The translation is too literal, it’s a word for word translation resulting in unidiomatic Danish.

–          It has many style errors and spelling errors.

–          Let’s hope the client decides to have another go at this.  The quality of their English web copy differs quite a lot.

Traditional Chinese

–          Inappropriate wordings such as 體味, which evokes the imagination of body odour.

–          Mistranslations such as 13個標誌性網站. Original says 13 iconic stops along the way, translation says 13 iconic websites.

–          The translation is too literal and needs to be polished extensively to be marketing-worthy.

Simplified Chinese

–          The translator misunderstood the source text in places and as a result it will need to be completely re-translated.

–          The translator seems not a skilled Chinese writer as some of the sentences are just plainly grammatically incorrect.

Korean

–          Unfortunately I had to re-translate the whole thing.  Some sections were too literal and translation-like (therefore comic…). [Korean examples provided]

–          Some transliterations of place names are incorrect. [Korean examples provided]

–          Some expressions are too literal to be marketing materials (not enticing, but rather scaring people off)

Japanese

–          The style of this translation lacks enormously. Like the English source, the Japanese translation should provide exciting and positive images of traveling, and it’s not.

–         The translation is too literal and the word choices are not creative. The text sounds immature and therefore risks giving Japanese visitors an impression of incompetence. [Japanese examples provided]

–          Imperative or prohibition type sentences tend to exude negativity and this translation may not achieve the desired result, i.e. encourage visitors to book your holidays.

It was only by chance that it got discovered.

A couple of months ago, a major Australian tourism and travel operator had their website translated into eight languages, including Dutch. The translations were delivered in Word and as their web developer was uploading the content, he paused when he saw the Dutch version. He knew a bit of Dutch as his wife was Dutch and he asked her to come and have a look. What followed would be every company’s worst nightmare.

The translation was disastrous. It was substandard in every way. The web developer told his client about his discovery and advised them to get a second opinion on all of the translations. If the Dutch translation was that bad, perhaps the others were too?

The web developer happened to be our developer and he knew about our QA procedures and positive client feedback, so he recommended Absolute Translations. My native language is Dutch (being from the northern part of Belgium) and I immediately saw that the Dutch translation was full of errors of all sorts: mistranslations, grammar mistakes, spelling, style, tone, punctuation, capitalisation and the list goes on. To top it off, the translator used truly unidiomatic Dutch while following English syntax. It could as well have been translated by Google. So the client’s nightmare began.

We were asked to start the re-translation process on the Dutch version and review a section of about 500 words on the other translations, so the client could decide whether they were passable or needed re-translation as well.

The feedback was equally bad. The quality of the translations was way below what would be acceptable for a commercial website. It was so bad it was comical, but no-one was laughing…

Click here to read some of the feedback received.

The client had to make the unfortunate decision of having their whole website re-translated, in all of the languages. It cost them not only in money, but also in time and effort. The website had to be up before the start of spring, but it was to take two more months to be completed. A loss of two months’ worth of income cannot be underestimated. The whole situation was painful for everyone involved.

My conclusion is that getting it right the first time around is critical. Your corporate image and reputation are at stake with second rate translations, and you wouldn’t even know about it.

Clearly it’s difficult, but it pays to do your research before embarking on any large translation venture. Testing is vital. All the multinational corporations we are currently working with have tested us prior to engaging our services. It’s obviously a common strategy among larger companies, but seems to be rarer among the smaller ones. I’m sure they’ve had their fingers burned once before and learned their lesson.

If the web developer hadn’t known any Dutch, the client’s sticky situation would have gone unnoticed for who knows how long. A potential customer visiting your website will never alert you of any language issues, they will just navigate away and not give you a time of day.

As the saying goes, only monkeys work for peanuts, so cheapest is not always best. It’s up to you to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Veerle Vanderplasschen

It’s been on your mind from time to time… “We should really offer our content in other languages!” But you never got around to organising it. It’s all too difficult, really. Where to start, right?

Well, it’s not so difficult to organise as you think. For one, the source content is already there. You’ve already got your English website. The copy has already gone through all the stages of approval and it’s final. It’s live.

So what’s keeping you?   

1. The potential high cost.
2. A lack of time to organise.
3. Who to go to?
4. Which languages to choose?

And last but not least:

5. Why go through all the trouble if there is no guaranteed return?

I wish I could contradict you on all above points, but I can’t. You are right on all five counts. But I will argue: aren’t these the five considerations you need to make for every translation you need to organise, not just for a website translation?

Then what is really keeping you?

May I elaborate on each of the above points, so that maybe, possibly, hopefully, you will allow yourself to be seduced?

1. The potential high cost:

• Potentially, but not if you do it right the first time around. What do I mean? Read my story, a sad and frustrating case study of an all too common situation in the corporate business world these days.
• What if we offered you a 10% discount on all website translations as a reward for taking the leap? Just mention this article when contacting us.

2. A lack of time to organise:

• Probably, but it does take only one email to a translation service provider to get the ball rolling.
• If you don’t have the web content written out in a Word doc, ask for a quote based on the live content.
• Just make sure to ask for web localisation, which means that your content will not only be translated, but also localised – adapted – to the cultural and linguistic customs of the country or community you are targeting.
• Ask your existing web developer if he would be keen to assist; alternatively, ask the translation service provider to add a quote for the development process.

3. Who to go to?

• Not an easy one, as you will note from my story. But if you are considering outsourcing any translation work, contact translation service providers, ask for references and request test translations.
• Why? Because it’s critical to properly research and test language service providers before engaging their services. Your corporate image is at stake, as well as a fair amount of money.
• To start the process, compile a test translation or take a representative sample from your website –> ask the interested agencies to do a test translation in the languages you require –> be prepared to pay a minimal amount (unless they offer it free of charge).
• Ask your overseas agents or skilled foreign employees to be once-off proofreaders to check the test translations for you. Testing should be part of your corporate communications strategy when you’re outsourcing translation work.

4. Which languages to choose?

• This depends on which countries you are targeting or which countries will give you the highest ROI.
• Or, if you would like your website to be accessible to foreign language speakers in Australia, determine which communities represent your largest audiences.

And last but not least:

5. Why go through all the trouble if there is no guaranteed return?

• We all know the stats; I won’t bore you with percentages, languages and countries, but:
• It’s a given that most internet users will naturally feel more comfortable and understand you better if the information, products and services you offer are presented in their native language.
• And: since there’s less competition in foreign languages, your localised sites are likely to deliver a much higher ROI than your English site.
• A study conducted by California State University in 2006 showed that the majority of multinational enterprises believe localisation is either important or very important for achieving higher company revenues.

So then, can you risk not translating your website if you’re trading in foreign markets or looking to expand into new markets? 

Veerle Vanderplasschen

Forget Amis, McEwan and the Booker winner — these are the best novels of 2014.

by Tim Martin

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The year’s really interesting fiction took little for granted, questioned established structure and kept the reader perpetually off balance.

– Jenny Offill’s very funny, very sad Dept of Speculation (Granta) charted the breakdown of a marriage in fragments and epithets – “My plan was never to get married. I was going to be an art monster instead” – that cluster and occasionally cohere; if it’s a novel, it is one whose atomic bonds have been mysteriously, intriguingly loosened.

– Lars Iyer’s fascinating Wittgenstein Jr (Melville House) offered up a doomy, hilarious, thoughtful Cambridge comedy with a tone somewhere between Philosophical Investigations and Porterhouse Blue, as a bunch of dreadful modern undergrads struggle to make sense of a tragic, saintlike tutor who is not Wittgenstein, or not exactly.

– And Will Self continued his unapologetically modernist project with Shark, a prequel to last year’s Umbrella that whipped its babble of 20th-century voices into a monstrous white squall of a book, weaving in and out of the troubled minds of its characters (war veterans, drunks, unscrupulous psychiatrists) with terrible commanding élan. One page of this stuff looks terrifying; two and you’re hooked.

Other adventures in form proved similarly interesting.

– Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (Unbound) was not just the first crowdfunded work to enter the Booker longlist, but also an experiment in language on the order of Riddley Walker and A Clockwork Orange. Set in 1066 and written in a warped pseudo-Saxon English (“Loc it is well cnawan there is those wolde be tellan lies and those with only them selfs in mynd”), it was the first historical novel for ages where the action really seemed to be taking place somewhere else.

– The ferociously prolific American novelist Dave Eggers completed a three-year satirical trilogy with Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (Hamish Hamilton), a novel-in-dialogue in which a lunatic kidnaps his way up the American chain of national command until he finds someone to give him a straight answer.

– From France, Emmanuel Carrère contributed Limonov (Allen Lane), which built a compelling novelistic narrative around the true biography and tall tales of a Russian prankster, author and politician.

– Meanwhile, Howard Jacobson’s nasty satirical dystopia J managed the frightening, quixotic feat of writing a book about a second Holocaust without mentioning the J-word at all.

– Ali Smith’s irrepressibly clever prose is one of the more reliable delights in current British fiction, and How To Be Both (my pick for the Booker, alas) wound sneakily around big questions of gender, politics and art while managing to read like a cold drink on a hot day. It had a cunning gimmick too: half the print run was flipped so that the segment about a Renaissance artist preceded the one about a contemporary teenager, or vice versa. You’d have to read it to know why this was significant, but the technique carried an echo of an older typographical curiosity that saw print this year.

– Originally conceived in 1966, Tristano (Verso), by the Italian writer Nanni Balestrini, could only appear as its author intended in the era of print-on-demand, where its sentences were shuffled so that each book represented one of 109,027,350,432,000 unique variants. It’s an absurd experiment, of course, but, like a Burroughs cut-up, mine managed none the less to be drifting, impressionistic and oddly compelling. Yours might be different.

In fact, experimental novels seemed to be everywhere, some more successful than others.

– I hugely got on with Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (Sceptre), a cryptic, polyphonic novel about art and feminism in which a female sculptor publishes her work under a series of male aliases, but I had more furious arguments about it than any novel this year, which, I suspect, is what Hustvedt was going for in the first place.

– Karl Ove Knausgaard’s gigantic confessional project My Struggle hit something of a bump with Volume 3, Boyhood Island (Harvill), which receded from the écorché honesty of the previous two volumes towards a rather safer tale of the author’s Scandinavian childhood.

– Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back (MacLehose) was a transgressive success in the author’s native country, but this cartoonish comedy, in which Hitler is reincarnated in Merkel’s Germany and becomes a YouTube sensation, looked rather pallid in a place that’s been mocking the chap since the early Thirties.

– Rachel Cusk’s frosty prose is an acquired taste, but the insidious weirdness of her short novel Outline (Faber) isn’t easily dismissed. As a snarl of reported speech encircled its almost wholly silent protagonist, I took to imagining her as a giant eyeball on legs, though in fact she’s supposed to be a writer teaching a workshop in Greece.

– In the concise and moving End of Days (Portobello), meanwhile, the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck made swift work of the one-life-multiple-outcomes conceit touched on by Kate Atkins, David Mitchell (and, this year, by Claire North’s reincarnation fantasia The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) – and was, I think, the best of the bunch.

There were more traditional pleasures on offer.

– Richard Powers’s Orfeo (Atlantic) mixed forbidding current themes – bio-hacking, the American politics of fear – with the passion for classical music that has been latent in his work since The Time of Our Singing, and was the best thing he’s done in years.

– Peter Carey’s Amnesia (Faber) yoked Assange-era computer hacking with an Australian political conspiracy from the Seventies, and looks tamer in summary than it proved in practice as its dubious, drunken narrator went further and further off-message with his story.

– Zia Haider Rahman’s compendious, occasionally hectoring debut In the Light of What We Know (Picador) was the year’s most interesting first novel, gobbling up ideas and talking points – the financial crisis, the developed and developing worlds, war, terrorism, philosophy, maths – with the avidity of a combine harvester.

– I also loved the painstaking first half of Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests (Virago), a gay novel set in Modernism’s great year of 1922, and was just looking forward to an expansion of its deft insights into class and gender when the whole thing collapsed into a not-very-surprising thriller.

– The late French writer Robert Merle, whose Fortune de France series of 16th-century swashbucklers has sold millions of copies in his homeland, was translated into English for the first time in The Brethren (Pushkin, £12.99).

– And though I’ve been a fan for years of the small masterpieces of unease that Robert Aickman called his “strange stories”, I was knocked flat by the offbeat humour and lightness of touch in his first novel The Late Breakfasters, republished by Faber. If David Lynch had done Downton, this might be the result.

Read more

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Original article by Tim Martin in The Telegraph

I have always wondered how the world perceives us, translators. How the world perceives our profession of translation. Earlier today I spoke with a client who needed a four-page letter translated from Italian. It was a military discharge document bearing his grandfather’s name and it mentioned a large sum of money. His father and grandfather are Italian and he spoke a few words as well, so he could get the gist of it.

I asked him if he needed an official translation to submit to the government, but he did not need that. So I reduced the quote. He was stunned at the cost and said he might as well have it translated by Google. I mentioned he could certainly do that. Usually machine translation is not entirely accurate, but we also offered a post-editing service, if he needed that all. A post-editing service checks and polishes machine translations. Usually this includes re-translation of large parts, as a machine is still not a human.

I slashed our quote even further, to a rate so low I would not even find a monkey willing to translate for such peanuts. At this stage he became annoyed and said he might as well get one of his friends to translate it for him. I wondered why he had come to a professional translation service for a quote. I then replied that we are a professional translation service, and that our translators are highly qualified and skilled professionals. We need to make a living too, you know, and no, we are not a charity.

So what are we? Why does the perception exist that translation should be instant and, worse even, free? Only a few hundred years ago, the translation profession was one of the most respected professions in society. Now, one would think, with globalisation and all, it’s even more important. I think it will become harder and harder in this age of machine translation to educate the people of the world that translators are actually still important. Nothing beats the semantic understanding of a human… yet.