Fucked translation of the month

Congratulations to Begur, a council just over the Spanish border from France, which provides four languages on its welcome board telling you where you are. The Catalan and the Spanish are spelt wrong, the third language is probably Occitan (which most French tourists don’t understand), and the English is correct but casual. (Of course this is more stupid illiteracy and fucked interculturality than fucked translation, but an exception needed to be made.)

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Published
Last updated 23/08/2008

This post pre-dates my organ-grinding days, and may be imported from elsewhere.

Ajuntament de Begur (1):

Barcelona (1399):

English language (462):

Föcked Translation (414): I posted to a light-hearted blog called Fucked Translation over on Blogger from 2007 to 2016, when I was often in Barcelona. Its original subtitle was "What happens when Spanish institutions and businesses give translation contracts to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London and only charges 0.05€/word." I never actually did much Spanish-English translation (most of my work is from Dutch, French and German) but I was intrigued and amused by the hubristic Spanish belief, then common, that nepotism and quality went hand in hand, and by the nemeses that inevitably followed.

Spain (1881):

Spanish language (504):

Translation (788):


Comments

  1. What a great blog! Very amusing. Good old uncle Bertín, who lived in Manchester for six months in 1968, must be run off his feet with all the translation work!

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