A lot of people, including those who aren’t translators, will say (repeatedly) that good translation is about much more than replacing words with words. As a translator myself, I would say that this is probably at its most apparent with commonly used words and their different ranges of meanings and uses between separate languages.
My last project was a large legal document from German to English, where I kept seeing “vorgesehen”, which would probably make many native speakers of English think of the English word “see”, at least as a starting point (“pre-seen”, “foreseen”, or “something like that”). But when you enter this word on Google Translate – and we all know that machine translation software is notorious for being unreliable, through no fault of its creators – it translates it into English as “provided” or “scheduled”.
That’s the correct sense. But even then, legal document writers can be particularly prescriptive and rigid about the terminology used in what they write. Chances are they won’t accept wording that is “good enough” even if they will openly concede that it is accurate. This source http://www.dict.cc/deutsch-englisch/vorgesehen.htm… shows how awkward it can get. “Im Vortrag vorgesehen” can mean “intended by the contract” or, as the source shows, it can mean “provided in the contract” or “required by the contract”. But this means that, in a sense, “vorgesehen” can mean “provided” or it can mean “required”, which is pretty much what you’d call opposite in meaning!
I need to take a break.
How many people have invented words in a language other than their mother tongue? What about the French word “neppas” as a translation of the English “word” “innit”? I think it’s clear that it is supposed to be a shortened version of “n’est-ce pas”.
Remembering what I heard Chris Cardell say in that presentation, I would say that my line of work is one that is not (or hardly) susceptible to influence by the clientele. Something like the music industry definitely is – for example, Katie Melua and Led Zeppelin are as different as chalk and cheese! For all the endeavour and initiative shown by artists everywhere, it is just too tempting to say that clients define the music industry as much as, if not more so than, the artists.
And anyone wanting to open a cafe or restaurant in the belief that it’s relatively easy just because people will always have to eat, just knows damn well that there are so many different kinds of food, and that all sorts of culinary experimentation continues to be performed to this day.
In a variation on the same theme, I feel sorry for Lidl – it’s referenced in humour as the kind of place that only losers buy from just because everything is so cheap. There’s a Lidl in my home town and I think it’s fine. But my point is that, for better or worse, its clientele seems to define its reputation more than its own staff.
Addition: The thing is, I just noticed that Weblations http://www.weblations.com specifically says that it does website translations. Is that a good idea? I would actually say yes – it suggests that the people who work for them are actually well-versed at writing common people’s English when they translate, rather than merely knowing how to write articles full of jargon or anything overly complex when they translate, say, a technical manual or a court order.