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.
A verisimilar vignette, from the English sketch and the German/Dutch echt, Yiddish עכט, “real”: El juez de la Audiencia Nacional Javier Gómez Bermúdez ha imputado por un posible delito de humillación a las víctimas del terrorismo al guionista y director de ‘Tuerka News’, Facu Díaz, y le ha citado para el próximo día 15 en…
Héctor G. Barnés has entered the fight against the barbarian invaders, estas palabras que por desidia o contaminación utilizamos en inglés cuando buenamente podríamos emplear palabras de nuestro idioma. No se trata tanto de preservar la lengua –afortunadamente, el español se encuentra en una situación privilegiada a nivel global– como de preservar la riqueza de…
Off-topic, like most of the posts these days, but the Tenerife brand-hijackers (right down to the distinctive R in Mr Ramsay’s signature) are still at it. Couldn’t happen to a nicer man. More Iberian creativity: Duffin Dagels/Dunkin’ Donuts, Bar Kentumy/Kentucky and Women’Secret/Victoria’s Secret, Consum/Conssum, etc. And then there’s Iran.
Though its interest rate hike press release is only slightly more difficult to understand than Joseph Cotterill’s comment, and, despite its rather pressing concerns, it is still doing much better than the Ajuntament de Vic. Here’s a free comma to hang behind “loans” in para 2: ,.
My standard fare is NL/FR>EN legal and industrial, which goes down with a general lack of fuss and fury. But every now and again some loon writes, looking for someone to undercut Google Translate on, say, Serbian>Welsh, and sometimes I put out my horns, like the little Kyloe cow (do click!): for Romanian, for example,…
One Alfred López, rehashing what he has found in a thousand other places on internet: ¿Sabías que fue un error de traducción lo que convirtió a la manzana en el ‘fruto prohibido’? […] si cogemos la Biblia original (escrita en hebreo) y la repasamos no hay ni un solo momento en el que aparezca nombrada…
And what’s your problem? Perhaps that the pun only works with one of the two common pronunciations of “answer”: /ænsə(r)/, but not /ˈɑːnsə(r)/, for which you’d need to find an image of a column of ah-aunts.
Unprofessional Translation kicks off a discussion with “the tragic case of Willy Ramirez, an American Latino baseball player who was left paralyzed because of a misunderstanding over the Spanish word intoxicado.” More here.