and the MOST annoying part of the badtranslation is...

[cimorene]

I think the most maddening part of the Project That Pissed Me the Fuck Off is, okay, the reason you're not supposed to translate OUT of your native language is that you want the most natural, native-speaker-like translation.

That is to say, it's assumed that everyone has a more nuanced understanding of his or her native language. Which means that the theoretical advantage of having a translator translate out of their native language would be that their grasp of the source would be better.

I mean, so Norwegian Girl should theoretically have understood nuances of the Norwegian original that I might not have, if there were non-standard usages, colloquialisms, grammatical ambiguities - if the sentence could have multiple meanings or had a subtle mistake that makes it mean something wrong, like a misplaced modifier for example, then a native speaker should just naturally grasp it where I might not.

But Norwegian Girl's understanding of Norwegian is inferior to mine. And I don't actually speak Norwegian. I keep running across mistranslations that in no way can be attributed to her misunderstanding of how to form correct sentences in English, though she certainly does misunderstand this. I keep fixing sentences because she actually just didn't understand what the original sentence was saying - where she put the modifiers in the wrong place.

For example, here's her translation:

For Messages that are not to be stored in PROGRAM, a user can be designated who will be able to delete it or not.

This sentence is grammatically correct aside from the incorrect capitalisation, although the end is clunky and would be rephrased, if it were what the sentence actually meant. But it isn't. What the sentence actually means is:

For messages that are not to be stored in PROGRAM, one can indicate whether the user will be able to delete them or not.

Confusion is introduced by the way Norwegian doesn't use 'the' and 'a(n)' the same way English does, which means when you read the Norwegian sentence you have to grasp from context whether the case is general (referring to all users - which it is) or specific (talking about a hypothetical individual user). The sentence means that you can set, for any and all individual users, whether or not they have permission to delete messages - not that you can pick any single user you like and enable them alone to delete. There is no 'who will be able to' construction, or anything like it, in the source. And this is simply one example.

So I'm not just correcting mistakes due to her wholly inadequate English, I'm not just correcting inadvertent 'That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means', but I'm also, for proofreader pay - 1/6th of her pay - compensating for the fact that she does not actually have sufficient reading comprehension skills in her native language to understand the import of the document in the first place, let alone to translate that meaning for anyone else.

Comments

[nicocoer.livejournal.com]

. . . how did this chick ge tthe job? 0_o

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Sadly, there's a certain element of chance in acquiring the translation approval at this agency: they assign other translators to grade the test translations. It all depends on how smart/lenient the grader is.

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

Yup. I just finished proofreading an Eng-Fin project where the Finnish translator had a very, um, creative grasp of Finnish word order. Some of the time she simply seemed to be emulating the English sentence structure too closely, but every now and then she had inexplicably pulled the whole structure out of her ass. At least she had the necessary reading comprehension skills to understand the English sentences, but I doubt most of the people who'll be reading the manual would have had the skills to understand her Finnish without my restructuring.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Presumably your translator was a native Finnish speaker, though, and in that case how strange that they would make that kind of error... but the pool of English speakers who speak Finnish is much smaller than the other way around.

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

I hate this sort of thing. it's always assumed that native speakers have a better comprehension of their own language than non native, and sometimes of course, of COURSE it is true; but the reality is that between language geeks and subtle minds on the one hand and slightly idiotic peeps on the other, the reverse becomes true, and this happens often enough to wreck someone's work life - like here, yours. I'm sorry!

though i admit, seeing you struggle with these things makes me feel less alone.

also someday i shall have to question you on Trados.

*hugs*

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I'm confused about slightly idiotic people even going in for translation. I mean, overestimating your abilities is one thing, but applying for a job like this that you just aren't capable of? I wouldn't have the nerve! I wouldn't have imagined that I'd get away with it, although sadly she probably will...

[dreamnnightmare.livejournal.com]

on top of that, if she had known anything about software, she would have known that her translation was extremely unlikely to be correct. What she said isn't something that programmers do very often. Maybe she is related to/sleeping with/blackmailing the person who hired her.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that too, and she obviously knows NOTHING about software or computers because she misunderstands many of the most basic internet- and software-related concepts.