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.
That’s what Google Translate says. Now, bar fights with statistical algorithms tend to be step-by-step procedures leading to human humiliation, but I think Google Images agrees with me in this case that frikis are gross idiots while geeks are still confused but neat. Here side-by-side are search links and the top three meme trees for…
Lenox, who has been discussing the role (roll-on, roll-off?) of Google Translate in quality public service provision, has passed along this little gem from the wider reaches of linguistic dilettantism – Colombia, where 1,221 medals were cast for the World Games without wasting precious time on letter-checking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itMv6sW-STk Lost Letters Departments have of course swept…
Michael Gilleland < Christoph Irmscher < Longfellow: The difficulty of translation lies chiefly in the color of words. Is the Italian “Ruscelletto gorgoglioso” fully rendered by “Gurgling brooklet”? Or the Spanish “Pájaros vocingleros” by “Garrulous birds”? Something seems wanting. Perhaps it is only the fascination of foreign and unfamiliar sounds; and to the Italian or…
Carles Miró has serendipited one N Tassin’s enlistment of Josep Pla and Eugeni Xammar, as short of money as they were of Russian, in his mission to bring to the benighted South Americans the curious blessings and recommendations produced in such prodigious quantities by his compatriot. Here’s a high-speed bit of unplanned Pla: Tassin placed…
The latest pseudo-anglicism to cheer my bedraggled brain comes from a 20-year-old Albacete knife manufacturer. (See also camping, parking, lifting, shampooing, footing, and Wikipedia.) I like the dropped /g/, which interestingly goes against a trend in Andaluz and increasingly in other versions of Spanish to add a terminal /g/ to words previously ending in /n/.…
Lenox may be on the verge of an important discovery. (It has been suggested that I am Lenox, or vice versa. Many faces fortune wears, but that is not one of them.)