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.
Cash-starved governments all over Europe are busy rediscovering VAT, and it seems that their inspiration may have come from that hitherto little recognised hive of intellect and invention, Malaga Airport: Attention V.A.T REFOUND Please remember that you must show the items in the V.A.T. refound office before checking them.
There’s no translation angle on this one, but you won’t find many Spanish eggcorns better than this contributed example from 2008: For the machines amongst you: Se ofrece señora para atención a personas mayores y discapacitadas Con titilación y experiencia y labores domesticas… Who says you can’t find staff these days?
What does the English translation of the official presentation website for Vinoble 2010 tell us? That the Mayoress of Jerez cares more about how her hair looks than about how her words are interpreted? That her administration is as thick as pigshit and happy to wallow in it? Well, not necessarily. Our etymology department has…
An amusing and presumably unintended glimpse of the Spanish economic pushmi-pullyu–are structural reforms for real or merely for foreigners?–is to be found on slide 22 of the “Kingdom of Spain Economic Policy and 2010 Funding Strategy” used by Secretary Campa yesterday in London (via): Can we implement this? We have done it in the past,…
Yep, but it‘s free, courtesy of Google Translate, and still substantially better than the work of many professional translators. It’s also fun (FT’s Alphaville blog is fast-moving cabaret) and not inappropriate to the crackpot tone adopted by José Blanco in the Spanish original. The last few days’ translation classic was also delivered by the Spanish…
Off-topic this week, I came across this remarkable headline: To beat the traffic problem in Trabzon scalpel was the first step. The subhead reinterprets the story to the disadvantage of the surgeon: Traffic problems in Trabzon take the first step was to shoot scalpel. Contacts there tell me that growing trade with Georgia and Russia…
In an FT piece a couple of days ago (via) we learn that “As Benoy discovered to its cost, interpreters need to be close to the subject matter as well as competent linguistically”. I didn’t catch the Zapatero Snakeoil Show chez les Obama the other day, but I did see most of Hillary’s slot on…
Kindly contributed by C, here’s a sign from the toilets of a restaurant in Jaén: Don’t though any papers into the water close. Use the trash bean. There is too much material here to deal with in one post, but we can report that modern forensic linguistics, combined with a couple of glasses of wine,…