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.
From Colin Davies, who I suppose might be prepared to fix Turismo de Pontevedra‘s problems on an ongoing basis in return for free tapas and the occasional lift home in the mayoral limo. The Galician, on the other hand, looks fine – no tourist added-value there, but still plenty of votes, even in a recession.…
This is the The Great Guide of Jerez (La gran guía de Jerez), part of an on-going, multi-million-euro campaign that may or may not impact on Jerez’s image – in novels I’ve read – as the ancestral home of the extremely rich and extremely poor, united only in their drunken delinquency and periodic attempts to…
Victor Mallet has a good piece on Spain’s damagingly mistaken claim that Zapatero had successfully begged $9 billion from China. Chinese state media seems now to be hinting that, while some bucks may be on offer, Spain needs to present some bang asap – usufruct of the Balearics as latter-day Deshimas, proposes a mischievous voice.…
Doing the rounds, and sent this way by Carlos Ferrero Martín. Comments on the post say the Spanish TV interpreter is working from the English interpreter rather than from the Fukushima spokesman’s Japanese, and he appears, shall we say, less than impressed by the quality of information on offer and forgets the microphone is on:…
Says Come2Israel.com in my Google ads. With English like that, it’s not surprising the Iranian navy is skipping Israel and taking shore leave in Syria.
If you are good (or if you are bad but unsackable) you will eventually get sent on a course where you will eat and drink as much as you can while some loon repeats to you glib mantras derived from Ciceronian oratory. One of these, “you are the message”, turns up slightly disguised on the…
There is a vague reek of sulphur in the English version of Hoteles Servigroup’s website (fingers say “webstie”: begone swine, and Satan), but the angel with the bottomless pit really lets fly in a puff-piece at a site invented for that purpose, which, because that is what the author, Ms Sauron, would surely want, we…
At a crucial moment in Spain’s fortunes, the bank restructuring fund (Fondo de Reestructuración Ordenada Bancaria, FROB) has come up with a lousily translated Powerpoint (h/t) explaining what’s being done. But anyone with half a brain can figure out what they’re trying to say (partly because it’s so bland, and unrevealing of the crucial numbers),…