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Progress...
Mar. 8th, 2014 10:29 pmI had hoped to do half of what I'm calling The Guerilla Job™ done today, along with some routine items, and then do the other half tomorrow and continue with the routine items, but I wanted to see just how long it would take me to complete about 2500 source words.
It took long enough, and the translation has an almost 50% higher word count, which blows my mind, because expansion is due to two different factors.
First—and quite unavoidable—is the structure of the respective languages, which causes the word count of Russian documents translated into English to increase by about 15%–25%. This will vary by subject matter. Over the years, for example, I've found that legalese tends to expand more than technical text (to around 30%–40% more words in the English text).
Second—and quite deadly, from a professional perspective—is substandard translation, which may be due to a number of reasons, such as lack of familiarity with applicable terminology or idiomatic usage, sloppy writing, or a deliberate effort to inflate word count (I once met a translator who would not "answer a question," preferring instead to "provide a response to a query").
In the immediate document, I have the following example, from a letter written by a partisan commander:
I shall have to do a particularly thorough despeckle of this document tomorrow, between those routine items.
Cheers...
It took long enough, and the translation has an almost 50% higher word count, which blows my mind, because expansion is due to two different factors.
First—and quite unavoidable—is the structure of the respective languages, which causes the word count of Russian documents translated into English to increase by about 15%–25%. This will vary by subject matter. Over the years, for example, I've found that legalese tends to expand more than technical text (to around 30%–40% more words in the English text).
Second—and quite deadly, from a professional perspective—is substandard translation, which may be due to a number of reasons, such as lack of familiarity with applicable terminology or idiomatic usage, sloppy writing, or a deliberate effort to inflate word count (I once met a translator who would not "answer a question," preferring instead to "provide a response to a query").
In the immediate document, I have the following example, from a letter written by a partisan commander:
Прошу и требую возвращения дезертиров в мою бригаду...Technically, taken out of context, one could simply write "deserters" in English (instead of "the deserters"), but in context, the article must stand, and so just in this one sentence, we have a 50% "expansion."
I request and require that the deserters be returned to my brigade...
I shall have to do a particularly thorough despeckle of this document tomorrow, between those routine items.
Cheers...
