“Education for the Citizenship”: deliberately poor translation from the Valencian government?

CASE SOLVED: IN DECEMBER 2008 THE VALENCIAN GOVERNMENT STOPPED GIVING THIS SUBJECT IN ENGLISH

Just seen on CNN+, a Valencian teacher teaching central government’s controversial new Educación para la Ciudadanía. In Spanglish, as required by her bosses. So the first words she writes on the blackboard are “Education for the Citizenship and Human Rights”. Even Google Language Tools translates it correctly as “Education for Citizenship”. The Valencian government’s website gets the title right, but the damage is already done.

The content on the website is poorly written and plagued by poor and inaccurate translation. With very few Valencian teachers (or students) speaking decent English, there seems little chance of anything fruitful arising from the initiative. This may for party-political reasons be what the Valencian government wants, but it’s difficult to imagine foreign businesses looking at this and saying, Hey, the Valencians are really taking education seriously, let’s invest.

What a bunch of freaking clowns.

Similar posts

Published
Last updated 18/07/2018

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

Barcelona (1399):

Clown (16):

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.

Generalitat Valenciana (2): The Generalitat Valenciana is the generic name covering the different self-government institutions under which the Spanish autonomous community of Valencia is politically organized. It consists of seven institutions including the Corts Valencianes, the President of the Generalitat, or the autonomous government itself.

Spain (1881):

Spanish language (504):

Translation (788):


Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *