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.
In a world of staggeringly incompetent amateurs the website of Textiles Athenea is just run-of-the-mill hound-dog, so I wouldn’t even mention it if someone hadn’t wept an empathic tear at a job ad of theirs that came flashing past. Hmm, to be the sparkling hub of their textile pattern design, collection formation and trend spotting…
Chez Lexicool, via MM, Katia, who, using Facebook in English, described herself as being in a civil union with Juan, only to have a lucky escape from her mother-in-law, who, using Facebook in Spanish, had understood that this was in some sense a homosexual union, and was just about to order some educational literature from…
Peter Harvey has discovered two spacious rooms, lightly high in the Alhambra. “Room of the beds” is the literal translation of “Sala de las camas,” which must lead not a few visitors to giggle and wonder what the difference is between a “room of the beds” and a bedroom. Traditional use in English for such…
La Información’s reporter says that this publication by Education First, a teaching multinational with an interest in making target clients nervous, shows that of the European countries examined, only the Russians and Turks had worse English skills than the Spanish. He then left to finish his primary school geography class, and so didn’t have time…
1966, and here’s series 1, episode 1 of the Strine Bond: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Lh6i9096Q Let’s rewrite that: Good morning, Mr. Irving, Your mission, Washington, should you decide to accept it, is to compile a series of cultural and historical sketches laying the foundations for tourism policy in Granada and to a considerable extent in Spain in general.…
Lenox comments on Almería’s latest tourism whizz: the incomprehensible in pursuit of the inexistent, perhaps. For some reason this recalled Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, a wearisome metaphor for the failure of Serbia, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend – I can’t even remember whether I was given the male or the female edition. Some…
Carlos links to an interesting story about the sodomy committed on Vitoria’s new slogan by some no doubt well-paid functionary, “donde el verde es capital” becoming, word for word, “where the green is capital.” I think we can all agree that, in a miserable start to their meaningless year as European Green Capital, they have…
We are too smart to buy this crap off Festina, because we happen to know that according to Maya prophecy on December 21 2012 we will be so smoothly and swimmingly plugged into the Earth’s electromagnetic battery that all our timepieces will explode and we’ll need to buy new ones. Neither the copywriter, nor the…
Malaprensa explains how the publicly-funded news agency converted Eurostat highest and lowest obesity percentages for EU member states for the year 2008/9 into year-on-year growth figures for the EU as a whole, and how the fatherland’s press repeated this unquestioningly. Pay a translator and avoid being stamped as incompetent and ending up on the street…