While my income-earning activity amounts to little more than sitting at a laptop searching for translation projects online, receiving them, doing them and sending them back, I can agree that, in this day and age, it is highly recommended for business owners to have a blog or a newsletter, or something like that; hence me having this business Facebook account and adding comments to it where I can. And of course I appreciate it every time someone takes the time to read comments I have included on my Facebook business account (for whatever reason). Having said that, it’s not as if the thing I offer (translation) is really something that frequently “changes with the times” clearly and conspicuously – certainly not like electrical products or music, for example (although the current situation with machine translators and CAT tools has certainly shaped the field of translation, including the translation profession).
In fact, in all candour, I would say that, given the details of what I specifically do in my role as an entrepreneur, the range of relevant things I could write about here while being confident about not sounding hopelessly flat or aimless, is very limited compared to certain other entrepreneur profiles. Although it’s all very well to write about the impact that something like society or the economy has on your own business activities or on your industry in general, if there’s one thing I refuse to do it’s to write a comment about every other translation project I’ve done ad nauseum – I just know that loads of those would get boring and repetitive to read; it would be stupid.
But I am determined to write about my experiences with some of my latest projects, for the simple reason that I do think it’s worth it on this occasion. And I’ll start this by talking about an ongoing translation project I’m doing which is translation of questionnaire responses related to Nokia products (French to English) – easy stuff, at least in theory. All these individual responses, of greatly varying length, are usually all written in casual French, and spelling mistakes and punctuation errors are common (this includes a lack of a full stop sometimes, so it takes a bit of time to identify where one sentence stops and another begins). Here’s an example (unedited):
“Très bon téléphone très fluide robuste mais pas de possibilités de changer la sonnerie des sms par un son perso accessoires façades + chargeur vraiment cher de plus la promo sur les accessoires n est valable que le jour de l achat (sachant qu ils n étaient pas dispo dans la boutique le jour de mon achat … Un petit geste commercial serait le bienvenue surtout pour un fidel de Nokia comme moi.”
They say that listening to your customers is only good business, but it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that not all customers are equal. And it’s not just about how much money they have or how likely they are to be interested in what you offer to begin with; at the end of the day, their various needs and wants dictate everything. They have different values and attitudes to the things they buy and consume; details of how they actually use what they buy from you are not always the same; some have this expectation or that expectation, some don’t; some will show this prejudice or that prejudice, some won’t. And when you keep seeing vague terms like “good” or “nice” or even “perfect” in customers’ feedback, you start to realise that they can’t ALWAYS be talking about the same thing / feature / idea every time they use one of these terms to describe it. One of the shorter comments that I have read in the original version of said project is, “Je n arrive pas a utiliser ce telephone.” Do they really mean, “I cannot use this telephone”? Or, on a more subtle level, is it more like, “I will not use this telephone!” i.e. “because from what I’ve seen so far with it, I think it’s a piece of c**p!” Just a thought. Another one is when I read, “je trouve que le Nokia musique est top”. Do they mean music composed by the Nokia staff or the Nokia theme? I don’t know, but then even if we knew the name of whoever posted this, it would be such a silly idea to try and track them down just to find that out! When I read “Quasiment genial!”, I first thing I thought was, “But who on Earth says ‘Almost great!’ in English?”… in the end I decided that the best thing to put as my translation of this was “It is great!” Good idea? You decide.
Another translation project I have done recently, also from French to English, was a couple of Powerpoint files talking about the French agricultural industry. When I read, “Un poids économique majeur”, I knew better than to translate “poids” literally as “weight”, which is why the English translation I eventually wrote for it was “a major economy player” – looking back, I suppose “contributor” would have been a better word – but the thing is that I put that even though the subject matter of the original material was not economics per se. When I read “La filière agroalimentaire” in the original, given the context in which I read it I just had to check it online; and one source I consulted translated it as “the food chain”, something which I suppose indeed shapes a country’s agricultural industry. I was originally going to put something along the lines of “the food industry” – but I also guessed that even if this were the correct meaning of “La filière agroalimentaire” in this context, there was every chance that the correct terminology might have been “agricultural sector” – “real government and politics discussion talk”, so to speak. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this document also talked about business in connection with the French agricultural industry, and I had to point out that I was not sure whether “Déficit d’image” meant “compromised / tarnished image” or “lack of exposure” (my project manager eventually said that it was “lack of exposure”).
A third translation project I have done recently was medical-related (this one French to English as well). Apparently, “Il est probable que” can mean, “It is likely that”, which is more than, “It is probable that”. And “patients non immunisés” can mean “non-immunised patients” or “non-immune patients”, the latter of which seemed odd to me at first.
And now I will talk about a fourth translation project I have done recently: about the recent activities of skiing products manufacturers, this one from German to English. One of my favourite bits of this in the original (in terms of thinking of a fitting English translation for it) was a headline that went, “Tourengehen leicht(er) gemacht”. I didn’t want to write anything square-wheeled and it didn’t feel right to put, “Touring made easy(er)” or “Touring made (more) easy, so what did I write at the end of the day? “Touring made (yet) easier.” I’m proud of myself for that idea.