For me, the most frustrating thing about being a translator is the prospect of people accusing you of poor work / mistakes where the root cause of it is not so much laziness as it is a) being misled or b) when you know you have taken the time to understand the correct message but can’t think how to put forward a totally lucid translation of it and what you do manage to formulate still ends up confusing the reader somewhat. And most of us know what it’s like to be misled, and probably also what it’s like when you know exactly what you want to say but don’t really know how to put it. For example, is there actually a ready translation of the common English word “whatever” (on its own) in French and German (when it is not in any kind of sentence)?
There was once a translation project (German to English) I did in which I kept seeing the word “Auftraggeberin”. From my education in foreign languages, I’ve been conditioned to view this solely as a female equivalent of “Auftraggeber”, meaning “client”. But, in certain online sources, the same word is also translated into English as “orderer” or “commissioner”… I guess the most fitting word depends on the service / activity in question. Google Translate even translates it as “Procurement Office” or “Contracting Authority”.
In another project I did in the same week, also German to English, the original document was about food processing and packaging technology, more specifically about German food and processing and packaging technology and the market for it across the world. There was a bit where it pointed out that sometimes adaptations to it need to be made if it’s going to be installed in a country other than Germany; if you don’t live in Germany but you want a food processing or packaging machine installed somewhere where you are, you might have a hard time determining whether or not it would be possible to have a German one installed (NB the document says that German food processing and packaging technology is among the best in the world). Anyway, there was a bit in the original where there was a subheading which went, “Mehr Nutzen für die Weltbevölkerung”. Given what I’d just read about the presence of this German technology in the world, my first thought was definitely like, “More use by the world population” i.e. “how we ensure a higher level of use of these machines all over the world.” But I had been thrown by the word “Nutzen” – having understood the text that followed this subheading, I realised that the text of this subheading actually meant, “More benefits for the world’s population”. So I changed it to that.