AlexPGP's Corner

I just got a note from an agency I did a small job for last week. It reads:

The client we did this sample translation for came back saying that they rated the quality as poor. Can you look at it and advise your input?

I was a little nervous as I waited for the file to open. However, the nervousness evapoated quickly upon reviewing the edits. Here was my reply:

For the most part, the changes appear to represent a different choice of words, e.g.:

"prepared to propose" becomes "ready to offer"
"which makes it possible" becomes "thereby making it possible"
"were considered" becomes "have been taken into account"
"information on sales" becomes "information about sales"
"presented information" becomes "information presented"

I won't bore you with a complete recitation. In my opinion, however, this comment applies to better than 9 of 10 edits in the returned file.

Are there what I would consider to be proper edits? Yes. My sentence that was edited to read "confirmation can be provided" was perhaps too literally translated. And while "alcohol market" is, in my opinion, perfectly serviceable, "alcoholic beverages industry" is probably better.

Do any of the edits detract from the text? In my opinion, yes. For example, starting a sentence with "And producers" instead of simply "Producers" adds nothing to justify violating the "don't start sentences with 'and'" rule. There are also some turns of the phrase that I would not use (for example, I don't think "history relating to previous orders" is as tightly stated as "history of previous orders") but I don't want to fall into the same trap regarding choice of words.

There's more!

In a follow-up email, the client asks me whether or not I consider my translation to be of high quality. Here's my response:

In my opinion, the translation is of high quality. There are no omissions, misspellings, or mistranslations that I saw corrected among the edits, and I think anyone reading the English will clearly understand the meaning of the original text.

That said, does that mean I think that my text (or any text, translated or otherwise) could not be "polished" with judicious editing? No.

Apropos of my previous email, I might add that, if this sample was meant to be a marketing piece, it is generally considered poor form for a company to announce that it is "pushing the use" of anything. This seems to be something the editor added that is not in the original, as the Russian source text states "компания делает ставку на" which pretty much means the company is "betting on" something (which is acceptable in marketing copy).

Ye gods.

Cheers...