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.
“All day I’ve faced, the barren waste,without a taste of… Can you see that big green tree,Where the sandwish’s running free,And it’s waiting there for you and me?” I do Cool Water with the organ, and it’s a great favourite, but the other day I made the mistake of introducing the mirage song as a…
Boby Lapointe, an obsessive, deranged comic genius who seems to have drunk himself to death aged 50, points to one of the delicious traps lying in wait for elephants who proceed beyond their French-English phrasebooks – the fact that of the supposed infinity of possible sentences in natural language, most are nonsense: What time is…
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde y Luis Garicano at Hay Derecho had a look last year at the CV of Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, Rajoy’s excellent choice of candidate for the Andalusian elections, and were puzzled by what they found: Empecemos por el MBA. Si su título de grado es de 2010-2011, su Master en Dirección y Administración…
Some Spanish media mistook a translatable adjective in a Daily Mail article for an untranslatable proper noun, perhaps even imagining that it ran in the great tradition of Spanish female first names: Angustias, Benigna, Consolación, Dolores…
“In front of a child playground,” no less. Bit chillier than Vietnam/Cuba/…, but conceivably preferable to Westminster. (H/t C) Update: I’m told that the agent pronounces it “pederastian”.
Pilar Sánchez Muñoz (PSOE) is responsible for various entries here between 2005 and 2011. Now she’s been arrested -like half the Andalusian PSOE during the caso Edu– for complicity in the theft of educational subsidies: En Cádiz, las pesquisas han salpicado a los responsables políticos de Mercajerez SA, la entidad controlada por el Ayuntamiento de…
The economy’s stirring, and there’s a job going for a shepherd-shearer (via) in Solana del Pino (pop. 363), on the border between Ciudad Real and Jaén provinces. But there’s a catch: unlike many Spanish-English translators in this country, he/she needs to be able to speak and write English.
The excellent Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, dedicated to exposing literary scams, has discovered Author Translation. This agency appears to specialise in EN->ES at extremely low prices – 0.02$ per translated word is quoted. As Victoria notes, they find English a struggle, but the sample Spanish translation provided (grab) -of an Arthurian romance self-published by…
Here. I suppose the murder of Nicholas Walsh before he completed his pioneering translation into Irish of the New Testament may have alienated talent from the market.