In a number of posts (see below) I’ve suggested that rather than use cheap, crap human translators customers should consider free, often-not-so-crap machine translation, so it was only a matter of time before someone called my bluff. Tom has sent over a lovely piece from Ara re the use by the Catalan regional government of…
Yesterday the Catalan government mounted some kind of co-branding (brand leeching, if you prefer) spectacle with the Japanese ambassador to Spain, which seems to have been designed to encourage the local public to contribute money to Japanese reconstruction and the Japanese to empathise with Catalan nationalist aspirations. Much was made of the virtues of industry…
Watching them grow? Or is there a sexual metaphor in the Government of Catalonia’s 9 billion euro March bond issue? The document is actually fine as a whole so I guess they just copy-pasted the list of public “companies and organisations”. Arrel in “Fira d’Espectacles d’Arrel Tradicional, Mediterrani” is correctly translated as “roots”, but a…
Picking up linguistic errors by the Catalan government is shooting phish in a barrel–they often have difficulties with Catalan–but my non-empirical impression is that they and other local authorities struggle rather more with German than with English. Classic English errors are still there to be enjoyed, of course: take for example {-gn -> -ng}, as…
A delightful mistranslation on the Generalitat’s translation page (you’ll probably need to click through to the English version if your language default is Spanish or Catalan). (Thanks JD)