alexpgp | Recharging... and working again!

Another job came into the office today, and it was not the backtranslation job that was offered yesterday but never followed up upon after I called and left three messages for the project manager who sent me the original e-mail. It's all to the good, however, as the new job is with a better client, and anyway: backtranslations are tricky.

The idea of a backtranslation is fairly simple: if you want to check the quality of a translation, you give it to someone to translate back into its source language, without giving the translator the original source, naturally.

In theory, what you get back should provide the meaning of the original. In practice, it's a little like playing the juvenile game of "telephone," except the stakes tend to be a little higher. People can get severely ticked off, especially if they expect to get back the original text, word for word, which is clearly not feasible for a text of any reasonable complexity.

For example, if the original says, "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain," and the backtranslation comes back with "The snow in Peru is deep," you know you have a problem somewhere. But what if it comes back as "The plains receive most of the precipitation in Spain"? If you think some grown people won't argue until they're blue in the face about the difference (or lack thereof) in these two sentences, think again.

Now, you'd expect a bit less tension with such an arrangement if the client is an agency, but there are still opportunities for conflict therein. If the agency's project manager is not a linguist, then resolving discrepancies can be very tricky as the project manager attempts to get at The Truth™.

Anyway, what goes around comes around. They blew me off, I'm doing work for someone else. :^)

Cheers...