In the real world, it’s inevitable that, on many occasions, different people will think differently about all sorts of things, and that is enough to cause frustration and/or confusion even if they respect each other as much as could be hoped for. There is a case of this in this failed test translation I did which, had I passed it, would have led to a new translation agency actually registering me on their books so that they might offer me work at some point. As in the art of conflict resolution, when there is a complicated and/or tense problem at hand, seeking information that is enough to validate any kind of convincing relevant point you would normally back just doesn’t cut it – after all, I have read on the website of a different translation agency that it doesn’t matter how many languages you speak if you don’t listen. And, when you do listen, if you have any sense of dignity or integrity you will remember that being proven wrong is not necessarily a reason to feel nothing but shame and humiliation.
Now, in my career I have done multilingual proofreading work, perfecting English versions of texts with the original version (in my case, French or German) to hand so that I could refer to it. It may involve basic reading and reading comprehension skills but I never want to make too many changes, because that might give the impression of me being too critical and too fond of what are known as “preferential changes”, which could suggest that I am too in love with the sound of my own voice and I just have too much time on my hands to be entrusted with truly professional work; however, I don’t want to make too few changes either, because sometimes small and subtle, yet very meaningful things could still be overlooked and I wouldn’t want to have laziness or overconfidence to answer for.
It’s unusual for me to write about my failures rather than my successes in my business marketing but I have for some time been meaning to post a blog article about a test translation (German to English) I did in order to be accepted on the register of one of many new translation agencies I have expressed an interest in working for recently; a test translation which, like I mentioned, I have to say I failed. But when I say that I want to move on from this depressing moment, I do mean move on just a little bit wiser and more capable, and not just with what I would otherwise accept as renewed vigour and determination. That is my motivation behind me writing this.
So what happened? Well, after I completed my test piece and sent it off to them, eventually they sent it back to me and I looked at the track changes they had included in my English version of the material, indicating the mistakes I had made according to them. I had to accept that they felt a need to include more than one word I had somehow missed entirely, which I’m well aware makes me look very bad, so I can’t say I blame them for calling my test a failure. I will of course do everything in my power, which is a lot, to prevent this from ever happening again – and yet, I have to speak in my own defence all the same. In essence this means putting forth a case that I did everything in my power to give the content of the original material in this test full, proper, flexible and independent thinking – not simply thinking that I agreed I could plausibly label as “determined” – as I went about writing basically that which I would decide would be best to write for a proper English rendition of this material which I had never seen before and had never been briefed on, not even slightly. In any case, what follows is me remarking on the changes they made which I was to accept as corrections; to be fair to them, in some such cases, they had a point.
I can say that definitively because it all started with the very title of the material: “Navigationsbetrieb”. In English, the German word “Navigation” will always translate as “navigation” – probably no surprise to anyone – but getting the “Betrieb” bit required a definitive understanding of the words to follow… exactly how much more I would be required to read before achieving this, and where such key information lay, was never going to be explained to me, but then that’s just part and parcel of my work. “Betrieb” can mean “business” or “company” or even “factory” but I could tell that in this context it was much more likely to be along the lines of “operation” or “running”; but like I already pointed out, I was not briefed on the work and I simply had to accept it as up to me to determine just what the material I was translating actually was while expecting no assistance in the matter.
Anyway, I determined soon enough that this was in fact instructions for a car journey navigation device (or software application), or at least part of such material. The name of the product / whatever was not specified (which I accepted even back then was just as well, my reasoning being that it had probably already been translated into English and accepted and the thing already released into the market and I might have been able to just find these instructions online and, from that point, cheat by plagiarising!). Following the title, I wrote these words in my English translation: “If your input was not clear enough, or the navigation device could not assign your input clearly, corresponding lists will be displayed to you. In these lists, you can then select the address you want. Depending on the content of your input, lists with place names or street names can be displayed, and so can combined lists with both place names and street names.” …followed by a bit more, and all this was accepted by the person who gave me the test as flawless – it was also at that point that I decided that the best translation of “Navigationsbetrieb” was, in fact, “Operation mode”.
That said, I saw “Haben Sie in den Listen den gewünschten Ort bzw. die Straße ausgewählt” in the original, for which I put “If you have selected the place / street you want in the lists” – they insisted on correcting it, so to speak, to “If you have selected the desired place / street in the lists”. I guess I could excuse that, if only for the far-flung idea that the place “you” want is that which is wanted by someone who is not necessarily the very person operating this device directly. Then again, if you ask me I’d be more inclined to define a “desired” place or street as the opposite of what may be designated by some as a “shithole”.
I also translated “Adresseingabe” as “address insertion”, which they insisted on changing to “address input” even though the person who corrected it, unlike me, didn’t have English as their mother tongue – or maybe it was a native English speaker who did this and they never told me? In any case, in a way it makes sense because “input” and “output” are always related to computers and computer apps and technology in general whereas “insertion” is more applied in contexts of a mechanical nature, at least in my experience; although I have to say that I would otherwise have pretty much used “input” as a noun only as meaning the product of what is inserted into a device and not the actual action of inserting; which, in this case, I reasoned would be done by a human by writing something into a computer app, as you do these days. And that means a moment of compilation, not just simply putting something in and waiting for the due process to take place.
Actually, for a moment, given what the corrected file actually looked like when they returned it to me, at the point where they wrote “address input” they had, apparently, inadvertently made it look as if I had failed to include a word for the “eingabe” bit entirely – at that point all I could think about was how the app would likely only display “Address”, rather than “Address Input”, to the user when they were trying to use it at a time during which they, most likely, essentially depended on the thing.
Near the end I saw, “Wenn Sie Länderinfo einsprechen”, which I originally translated as “If you speak in Country information” only to see them change it to “If you say the command Country Information”. I don’t buy that so easily. Yes, I know people associate the word “command” with computer programs all the time, but, from a linguistic perspective at least – for that is what I personally do – a command cannot exist if there’s no verb!
Then there was, “Neben diesen globalen Anweisungen, finden Sie hier auch Hilfestellung für die Adresseingabe oder für Sonderziele.” I originally translated that as “Along with these global instructions, this is a place where you will also find help pertinent to inserting addresses or in relation to special destinations.” This was changed to “Along with these global instructions, here you will also find tips for entering addresses or special destinations,” which I would normally also reject. In any case, I took the “global instructions” as these very self same instructions (in hard copy) I was charged with translating, with the “help” bit to be recognised as in-device content (which I, of course, was unable to access). Maybe a phrase like “this is a place where you will also find help pertinent to inserting addresses” sounds a little bit unnatural, but what is that compared to what they suggested? Tips for entering addresses? Entering an address into a user interface of a device is not a hard concept to get your head around – even if it may take one a little practice to get used to it in any given scenario (i.e. the particulars of the otherwise simple procedure that one is expected to follow), if you are expected to insert input into a user interface at a time when you want to anyway, what’s so unstraightforward about it?
Finally, I quote “Sonderziele […] sind in der Karte enthalten und können dort angezeigt
werden”, which I translated into English as “Special destinations […] are included in the map, and they can be displayed on it.” There was only one small change they insisted on with that i.e. “Special destinations […] are included in the map, and can be displayed there.” I would never have put that, since a map isn’t really a place, and you wouldn’t expect it to be displayed anywhere else if you expect the thing under discussion to be helpful to you as a user of it! To refer to a given aspect in a computer program as a “place” in it? That doesn’t work for me!