Recently, while slumming it at the Extremely Cheap Translation Service, I ran across two texts that were strange in the same way.
The first was a German text: “Hallo meine hübsche Dame, wie machst du diesen schönen Morgen?”, which was already translated as “Good morning my pretty lady, how are you doing this fine morning?” (checking existing translations into English is my job at the Extremely Cheap Translation Service).
And….yeah….that is what it says. Except that it doesn’t, because that’s not how you ask someone how they are doing in German. “Wie machst du” is a literal translation of the English “How are you doing?” Also, you don’t call a Dame “du”. So as a German sentence, this thing was a mess. But my job was to approve the English translation and, yes, the English translation made perfect sense in English, although it did fail to reflect the fact that the German didn’t make sense in German because it was too English, so perhaps in that sense it was not a good translation, and it should have read, “Hello my pretty lady, how goes it to You this fine morning?” Anyway, I approved it, but I would have liked to know who put this through and why. If they were back-translating to check that their German sentence was correct, they got the wrong impression.
A few weeks later it happened again, at length and in French. This time it was advertising copy about a winter vest. The French side was essentially a literal translation of English, only sometimes it was worse than literal. For example:
“Ce veste volonté toujours tirer par.” (“This vest will always pull through.”)
The “worse than literal” part here is that “will” is “volonté,” which is the noun “will,” as in “Thy will be done.” The slightly less bad but still really bad thing about this sentence is that “tirer” means “pull” and “par” means “through” but if you know anything about languages, you know that kind of translation is not going to work. And keep in mind, this was a job where the source text was French, so what I was supposed to do was evaluate the English target text.
And the English side was perfect. That’s actually a little weird because the TM software used by the Extremely Cheap Translation Service is programmed to translate normal French into English, so it seems like this bizarre Franglais should have resulted in something confusing. It could be that it came out weird and the first human editor (there are always two human editors) guessed the client’s intentions and rewrote it.
This time I flagged it – it was long and seemed to have a more serious destiny than that little German sentence – and wrote a note about how the target text was fine but source text was nonsense. Incidentally, that’s about all the attention you can expect from your editors at the Extremely Cheap Translation Service.
ETA: Just to be clear, the ECTS didn’t do anything wrong here. Their clients were just being weird.