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.
More poorly translated save-the-planet spam: Ingles:Darkness world: On September 17, 2008 from 21:50 to 22:00 hours.Proposes to delete all lights and if possible all electrical appliances, to our planet can ‘breathe’.if the answer is massive, energy saving can be brutal.Only 10 minutes, and see what happens.Yes, we are 10 minutes in the dark, we light…
The organisation that pimped Aznar to Deloitte can’t afford a translator: There is only one person capable of combining intellectual stature, communication abilities, and bullfighting mastership: Luis Francisco Esplá. Highly recommended for international meetings and foreign notorious visits, he is the sole bullfighter able to make the audience vibrate in a convention or congress. As…
Bodegas Almocaden goes beyond the usual annoying Flash and cursor-stalker. All a bit sad: I’ve never drunk anything by them, but I suspect it’s pretty good. Unfortunately there’s more to life than product.
I think they mean tourist guides. (The link doesn’t take you to the English version, unfortunately, so you’ll have to look for it yourself. Globally speaking, Turisme de Vic’s has got to be one of the worst-built sites out there.)
Many thanks to Lenox Napier, who says this has been inflicted on businesses in Almería since at least the 1970s, and who notes the loving care with which fonts were matched when phone numbers changed from 6 to 9 digits.
It’s difficult to imagine a European medieval library where no one spoke Latin. The modern Biblioteca de Catalunya appears to be devoid of English speakers.
Critique of John Pinkerton’s Modern geography (1807) in The Edinburgh Review: Or Critical Journal: The original is, ‘Hay en esta cuidad unas beatas que ganan su vida ensenando [sic] a hablar a los loros,’ — i.e. by teaching parrots to speak. Mr Pinkerton has probably seen hablar in the title-page of some spelling book, and…
The excellent Lenox Napier points us to http://www.ibiza-tourism.net/. This is one of a legion of sites dedicated to spamourism–posting ostensibly useful, functionally redundant tourism information with the sole genuine purpose of harvesting Google adclicks. The domain registree, who is apparently based in France, is too thick or too lazy to use machine translation, so we…
Neither Randstad Work Solutions nor their “important international” client can spell “customer”. Unless they really are looking for a bespoke theatrical tailor.