A TALE OF A SELF-AVERTED TRANSLATION MISHAP, THAT ANYONE CAN GET A GRIP ON
Speaking as someone who has been a self-employed translator for 11 years, I say it’s OK to admit to being a bit uncertain about what you have read or concluded in material that you have been expected to translate, even if it’s for professional services. Not all translation mistakes are equally embarrassing or shameful (all humour aside).
What follows is a tale of a self-prevented translation error in a project I did very recently – one which anyone could “get” easily. I know that, had I not known better, I would have been foolishly misled out of nothing but my own conceited ignorance and I would have, effectively, allowed it, and yet – in this case, at least – in my heart I know that reference to the original material alone actually would have been enough to absolve me from any shame to be attributed to being wrong – and I don’t like seeing the expression “being wrong” being used on its own in connection with translation work. Such a claim may be correct in any given instance but on its own it doesn’t help to clarify anything. And just because an expression may be wrong doesn’t mean that it’s not easy to understand what was intended – indeed, it may be written in language that is actually wholly correct, just (at least) mildly unnatural and peculiar to a native speaker.
So, as part of the project in question, I ended up translating these emails from German to English. In the first one, the subject line was “WG: Ärzteausweis fertig”. To start off: “WG” is short for “weiter geleitet”, or “forwarded”, while “Ärzteausweis” means “doctor’s certificate” – at the time I accepted that a “doctor’s certificate”, so to speak, basically meant a document that certifies that one has qualified as a doctor, but not strictly in the sense of an acquired academic qualification attributable to a doctor; in all likelihood, as it were, more like a document indicating that someone has actually earned the right to practice medicine in the eyes of the law. And yet, that said, if such a conclusion is true, in hindsight I find that it would have been better translated as “medical licence”. I just didn’t think of it at the time, and I would say that my limitations in what I can do as a professional translator (or offer, depending on how you want to look at it) lie in this sort of thing. As it is, I have already submitted the work, before I started writing this article. But I ended up writing that bit as I was writing this very paragraph just as I was getting to the point that follows – true story. Now, “fertig” is the German word for “finished”. You see, having read essentially “doctor’s certificate finished” in said subject line for said email, I soon got to thinking that this was referring to a “doctor’s certificate and permit” – a “medical licence” indeed – which had expired and that the matter at hand was that this particular medical licence would need to be renewed to remain in force. But I was cautious about accepting that as the final conclusion, which is just as well, because in one of the later emails within this project the content of it read, “Ihr Ärzteausweis ist fertig und zur Abholung bereit”. This translates literally as “Your *medical licence* is finished and ready for collection” – again, it all lies in the word “finished”. You see, if a medical licence has expired then it would simply make no sense to declare it as “ready for collection”! I had no difficulty accepting the paradigm shift that came with this as I came to accept this bit as meaning “Your medical licence is ready [in the sense of produced, while officially recognised] and ready for collection.”
It’s a tale that makes me happy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OWOQF3dWi0