I originally posted this elsewhere, on October 2011…
Well, it’s October 7th, the day when “Johnny English Reborn” starts showing in cinemas in the UK. On one website I frequently visit, advertising for this is prevalent and conspicuous, and it encourages people to buy tickets online or, to put it in their own words, “click now to enroll”.
I can see that that phrase is an advertising gimmick – everyone knows damn well it’s not prompting people to “enroll” as a spy! But, as a translator, I do wonder how a non-native speaker of English would react, so to speak, to the phrase “click now to enroll”. I imagine him/her ending up confused. You don’t “enroll” or “enlist” in order to acquire tickets to see a film, although I suppose you can “register” tickets in this way. It does seem to me that he/she could end up with a skewed idea of what “enroll” means in the dictionary sense. I sympathise.
http://www.larrasstranslations.com/
Their motto is, “We love language. And that shows.” Yet in French they translate this as, “Les langues : notre amour toujours neuf” which, when translated literally, means “Languages: our love ever new.” Was the motivation for using this particular phrase in French some French cultural aspect I don’t know about?
I’m convinced that this is the case. It lies with the link between “love” and “new”. It reminded of a phrase that went something like, “Everything I see, I see because I love.” I can’t seem to find its source on Google, but I did find it interesting.
The best way to become a translator worth the name is to get practice translating poorly written documents (possibly ones that are bad translations themselves). True or false?
Response from Gunnar Lahr (Mila Sprachendienste): “Definitely true. And there are an awful lot of bad translations. Last week I saw an English website of my region (the Ore Mountains). One German headline was “Das Erzgebirge, wo Sie von Räuchermännchen begrüßt werden” (those little wooden figures that “smoke”). The English version was “The Ore Mountains where you are greeted by smokers”… “
Is it just me or do a lot of translators have their share of moments when they end up feeling like non-native speakers when they use their own mother tongue? I.e. when they use their mother tongue, it is generally intelligent and not overly casual or anything, but they can so easily imagine that it just sounds so weird to other native speakers of their own language.