I have been translating the most important parts of my website https://www.georgetrailtranslator.co.uk into the foreign languages that I speak (French and German) – this includes the Services bit.
That said, what I want to say in particular in this article is that I had to be really careful about exactly what expressions I decided on. An argument in point: this involved choosing from lists of synonyms all the time as I took a moment to question what I had already put here and there – I was trying to make it sound truly “native-friendly” as opposed to the sort of thing I would have written (or “just ended up writing”, depending on how you want to look at it) in my French and German lessons back in school.
I have written extensively about the challenges behind good and accurate translation (translation can be inaccurate even if it is “good”!) in my blogs, and it’s not just phenomena that most people can easily get acquainted with – will identify straight away when they come across an example of it, depending on how well they know the language in question – a word being used incorrectly, wrong word order, poor punctuation, a case of someone having an incorrect idea about meaning with a particular word, the list goes on. I won’t go into unnecessary detail about anything in particular about the French or German languages – and this would likely cause frustration for people who are not as specialised in them as I am – but here’s a couple of examples of what I mean by this that I came up with off the top of my head. In the case of German, just look at the several meanings that can be attached to verbs like “stellen” and “nehmen” and how ambiguous they can sound if there’s not enough clear context in instances where they are used; add to this the fact that these same verbs frequently come with various prefixes (bestellen, einstellen, aufnehmen, unternehmen etc.). And sometimes, the specific “standard” word in a foreign language that you were taught for something may in practice have a lot more specificity attached to it by native speakers than you were taught back in your lessons for the language.
Yet as surprising as it may seem to some, I confided in Google Translate for French and German translations of certain bits of content, being genuinely convinced that this software is good at generating native-friendly output – but I never accepted anything uncritically. A few cases of this are discussed further, as follows.
One example: I translated “Than look no further than George Trail Translation Services” into German as “Dann müssen Sie nicht weiter als George Trail Übersetzungsdienste suchen” (literally: “Then you need not look any further than George Trail Translation Services”; I didn’t use the command form). The “müssen Sie nicht” bit was my own work – I have known, long before I even started working as a translator, specifically that in German this does not mean “you must not” – a prohibition – but “you do not have to” (while the standard German expression for “you must not” is “Sie dürfen nicht”). But, if you know German well, take a moment to understand that I reasoned that both “nicht” and “nichts” would have worked in their own right!
When translating “requirements can vary” into German I originally put “Anforderungern können schwanken” but later switched “schwanken” to “variieren” (even though the latter looks decidedly more English), as a translator’s client’s requirements of the translator are not likely to change as a given translation project for them progresses. That’s not what I meant to hint at (obviously); I meant for it to reflect how individual clients’ requirements can vary from project to project!
I was conflicted about what to put for “legal translator” in German. I eventually changed “legal” and “rechtlich” in my German translations to “juristisch”, mainly for the sake of uniformity i.e. the SEO keywords element (even though I was perfectly comfortable putting “traducteur légal” in my French translations). That said, I also remember that I kept being offered the translation of “Rechtsübersetzer” – all a single word – for “legal translator”, and, yes, I accept that that played a role in me ultimately deciding on “juristisch”.
And I would eventually decide that it was better to translate “and much more” into French as “et bien plus” rather than “et beaucoup plus” (having originally decided that there wasn’t really anything I could have put other than “beaucoup plus”, but I was wrong).