Unloading... pardon my dust...

[alexpgp]

I figure if something remains a thorn in my side for several days, maybe I ought to exorcise it by writing about it. I've been able to successfully absorb a number of disappointments about the ProZ system of Kudoz, but a recent one sticks in my craw...

The asker was apparently dealing with a skin care catalog and wanted to know what "brouillé" means, as in the sentence:

Ma peau est plus luisante sur la partie mediane, son grain est plus serre sur les zones laterales. J'ai souvent le teint brouillé.

I hopped onto the net and found matching pages at Lancôme (a cosmetics company). In the French version of their cosmetics FAQ, I found the following question:

Que faire quand j'ai le teint brouillé, les pores ouverts, une tendance aux points noirs?

The same page in English offers the following question:

What should I do when my complexion is dull, my pores are dilated and I get black heads?

After reading this and a couple more paragraphs, I am convinced that "un teint brouillé" is "a dull complexion." A Google search confirms the word pair is used a lot in the cosmetics field (at least 10 pages of "hits"). I submit an answer at the ProZ site, and include links to both pages.

Some doodah looks up the word in a dictionary and offers the following:

"How about 'irregular' or 'mottled' - these are the closest I could come up with for a term whose only definition I could find was 'scrambled' (but not in reference to cosmetics)."

Number of Google hits for "irregular complexion"? Three.

Who gets full marks for answering the question? Doodah.

I suppose I am being petty in writing about this at all, but on the other hand, I should probably be happy that this is the extent of what's been bugging me, translation-wise, for the past couple of days.

What I don't like, though, is the nagging thought that the ProZ system of awarding points can be easily manipulated by colluding parties. X and friend Y could agree to award each other Kudoz points for translation-related questions, yet still use proper answers proposed by respondents A, B, C, etc. in their translations.

(What I don't like about it is the fact that I'm allowing myself to be affected like this. I suppose it's the competitor in me... I've always been a little over-the-top when it comes to word-based games like charades, Botticelli, Pictionary, Taboo, etc.)

Hey, that reminds me... it's been ages since I've played Botticelli!

Cheers...

Comments

mod them (-3)

[fxflynn.livejournal.com]

upon first reading the entry...i would have gone with the dull complexion also, mainly because i've heard the term 'teint brouille' used in that context of maquillage etc...

mottled seems a bit extreme to me, too reptilian or maybe just a light case of leporsy. ;)

i would be suspicious of the proz conspiracy too.

Re: mod them (-3)

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Yes, "mottled" is definitely not a marketing word. Nobody in their right mind is going to want to make a prospective customer feel bad by having them think of their complexion as "mottled."

Cheers...

[rillifane.livejournal.com]

Its my impression that teint brouillé means an uneven complexion.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Quite possible. A little Web research shows it's used often enough, and sometimes together with "dull."

Me, I figure that the folks at Lancôme know whereof they speak. OTOH, had someone proposed "uneven" and backed it up with something better than "I looked it up in my dictionary," I very likely would not have had the reaction I did. I've been doing this long enough to recognize the truth of there being "nine and sixty ways..."

Cheers...