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.
ABC and Ramón Pérez Maura are taken to task by Peter Harvey Linguist. As usual, he’s absolutely right, but I’d just like to enter a plea in mitigation on one count: “never begin a letter with ‘I'” used to be quite common advice. For example, in Correspondence, credits and traffic: Part I: Business correspondence (1914)…
Here, < Dick Hudson < again < Language Log. Your stammering linguistic runt of a host thinks they’re all wrong, and recommmends self-inflicted deep-vein trepanning as an alternative preferable to sentence diagramming taught by the hairy-palmed spawn of teacher training colleges. SD’s rather like warfare: a discipline that sometimes occurs to the old as beneficial…
Over at TottenhamNews.org, via Improbable Research, which cites some choice samples. Curiously, while the registrant’s address is said to be just round the corner from Ankara’s gloriously Martian Altınpark, the phone number is Dutch, and the only Turkish news that I’ve ever heard come out of Tottenham, north London, is of this planet’s most splendid…
Lars Bjørn Hanssen > Diario Sur (> Teresa Aguilar > Carlos Ferrero): The Diputación de Málaga gave €20,000 to help Loving Books publish an Atlas ilustrado de la provincia de Málaga; Alejandro Villén Real at Loving Books gave very little of that to an apparently unemployed receptionist for the English translation; no quality control was…
Take two adjacent consonants and a luscious little lightly-seasoned meat pie and this kind of thing is inevitable. For all I know Spanish cannibals scavenging at Camden, TN on March 5 1963 baked brawn: Take two Buttocks and hang them up two or three dayes, then take them down and dip them into hot Water,…
Roll your mouse over this copy-paste from CiberPaís, which copy-pasted from whichever MT tool they’re on (via the excellent Malaprensa): Hasta ahora, la ciudad de Cupertino devolvía el 50% de los impuestos que recibía de Apple por las ventas de la empresa. En el futuro, la ciudad solo devolverá el 35% de esas tasas. The…
Following on the previous instalment, Lenox has sent over this list, knowing full well that the phonology will mean nothing to me, for: «Si tú quisieras, Bacc[á]ra,contigo me casaría;daréte en arras y dotea Córdoba y a Sevilla.»«Casada soy, rey Trebots,casada soy, que no viuda;el Lenox que a mí me tienemuy grande bien me quería.»(Abenámar y…
Colin‘s letter to the Galicians: Ten years or so ago, I sent a personal letter to the Director of the said Rías Baixas Tourist Board, offering to translate all their promotional material for nowt. I never even had the courtesy of a reply. But, anyway, here’s how their English material turned out, absent my help.…