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.
I suppose that the use of “their” followed by “you” at the beginning of these parking fine instructions can be explained either as fucked translation or as an attempt to encourage a neighbourliness unusual in these parts, but I think the glorious use of “him” at word sixteen crowned by the subsequent “he/she” degenderisation clearly…
Over at Barcepundit, who recently found another amusing object. If Zapatero doesn’t achieve his paragraph in history for being present at the end of ETA, couldn’t we at least light a candle for his linguistic skills?
“Homes that make sense” might have been closer to what the Guadalajara construction company Hercesa intended to convey, as well as being better English (Well thought-of/well thought-out?), but that begs the question as to whom they make sense: to purchasers deluded into contracting mortgages in excess of their ability to pay, for flats in developments…
There’s a poet MT massacre over at Fruela Fernández (h/t Carlos Ferrero). OK, we should be ignoring algorithm-generated MT for spam sites, but it’s a quiet day.
No sooner has one bankrupt tribe finished subsidising with someone else’s money a visit by the billionaire Vicar of Christ when an opposing but equally impecunious clan pops up to proxy-finance solidarity tourism by the Spawn of Satan, no less, who might also have been able to pay for it themselves. But the really bad…
Google ads are not what they were never really going to be, and donations have been such a success that until this morning’s happy contribution a victim of comprehensive digitectomy could have counted the euros raised on the fingers of both stumps. But now the game has changed: the Bank of England has indicated that…
I haven’t talked to any of the perpetrators, but I have little doubt that the principal cause of what we regard as fucked translation is a misunderstanding as to its function: whereas English-speakers expect to encounter a linguistic resource, the aim of Romance-dialect-speaking businesses, politicians and civil servants in providing English translation is often symbolic…
Here: A certain bishop, one of our brethren, having introduced in the church over which he presides the reading of your version, came upon a word in the book of the prophet Jonah, of which you have given a very different rendering from that which had been of old familiar to the senses and memory…