Let the buyer beware

Looks like the South African government didn't have too much luck in choosing its language services firm, as attested to by all the funny commentary going round the web in recent days about the "fake" interpret.

Now it looks like the firm supplying the guy has disappeared:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25345627

Nice laypersons article on the limits of machine translation

I'm particularly glad that the writer emphasises that translations should be elegant.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/25/lost-in-machine-translation-star-trek

Resources for financial translators

Here are main resources which I would recommend for anyone wanting to specialise in financial translation:

• Dictionnaire de la comptabilité et de la gestion financière, Louis Ménard (third edition if you can ever get hold of it in Europe!) for French>English
• Wörterbuch für das Bank- und Börsenwesen, Hans Zahn, for German>English 
• The Council of Europe French-English Legal Dictionary, Frank Bridge (old but useful, the dictionary that is, not Mr Bridge, whose worth I am unable to calculate)
• Subscription to FT.com
• Subscription to The Economist
• Subscription to eIFRS (my latest move), which is vital if you translate the financial statements of any company that publishes under IFRS

Annual report masterclass in Leipzig

Last week I attended a masterclass given by Robin Bonthrone on IFRS and translating annual reports, with a focus on German to English.

A significant amount of time was given over to translation pitfalls. Especially useful was the review of latest IFRSs (especially IFRS 13).

I can recommend Robin's seminars to any translator, seasoned or otherwise, who wants to deepen their knowledge of accounting standards and how they affect us as translators.

FR > EN: "Commuter"

It occurs to me that metropolitan French has no word for "commuter" (please correct me if I'm wrong).

But Swiss French is able to (and does) borrow heavily from German. German helpfully has the word "Pendler", which has been borrowed into Swiss French as "pendulaire"(it already had the adjective "pendulaire" as in "train pendulaire").

The best the Collins-Robert can come up with is "banlieusard", which can also mean a suburban dweller who may or may not have a long commute to work. The dictionary gives the word "navetteur" but I've never heard this before, apart from in the form of "faire la navette".

FR > EN: Rewarding...

When translating the investment term "rendement-risque", perhaps use "risk-reward".

"Reward" tends to be underused in financial translation because we automatically translate "rendement" as "return" (which is correct). Both terms are used by Investopedia, for example:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskrewardratio.asp
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskreturntradeoff.asp

"Reward" just adds a bit of variety.

Hugo Dixon

For my money, Hugo Dixon is one of the best and clearest financial writers around. He cut his teeth on the Lex column in the 1990s then, in 2000, went on to found Breakingviews.com, which was snapped up by Reuters a few years ago.

He is currently "editor at large" for Reuters (whatever that means: perhaps he is entitled to take longer lunches than us mere mortals, or turn his mobile phone off, or become large by way of said long lunches?).

His blog can be visited by going to http://blogs.reuters.com/hugo-dixon/

Facing up to the new paradigm: private banks must dialogue, not just communicate + why not try Xing?

Here is a link to an excellent article in the special finance supplement appearing in Le Temps today (in French):

http://www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/aa17a71e-1498-11e3-9da5-8ad4c0806839/Les_trois_commandements_de_la_communication_bancaire_daujourdhui#.UidtoBZXtm0

How many Geneva private banks have a Facebook page?

Lombard Odier, my buddies who committed genocide on their translation team just before I was about to join them, have started one but it might have been better to refrain...

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lombard-Odier-Cie/349211655162941

It seems that most Geneva private banks haven't bothered starting a Facebook page (perhaps too low-end for them) but the problem is that Facebook has happily generated a page for them, containing wonderful information from Wikipedia on the bank in question  — which is alright if the Wikipedia page actually casts your bank in a favourable light.

One notable exception is Pictet Wealth Management:

https://www.facebook.com/PictetWealthManagement

This is an excellent page that promotes the PWM's economic research. And there are plenty of other good things too.

When I contacted Pictet, they stated that their Facebook page is mainly targeted at the Japanese market, where the social-networking site has a hybrid business/private-life role. Reportedly, their preference lies with Twitter and LinkedIn.

Personally, I think LinkedIn is a no-no because of:

1. Operation PRISM and other privacy concerns

2. The silly endorsement function that it now has, by which you can endorse people for skills from flower arranging to French. For stinging but warranted criticism of this site, see Lucy Kellaway’s article on 18 August: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a0423cca-040a-11e3-8aab-00144feab7de.html#axzz2f1uz8hvU

This “skills endorsement” feature has, in my opinion, done a great deal of harm to LinkedIn’s brand image.

Regarding Twitter, this from the FT on 13 September:

Twitter is fun but flawed. Try following a discussion or argument, or searching for an interesting link someone tweeted a few days ago, and see how easy you find it. 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5837c954-1a8a-11e3-93e8-00144feab7de.html#axzz2f1uz8hvU

So Facebook is too juvenile, LinkedIn has shot itself in the foot, and Twitter is hard to keep track of.

Where does this leave private banks who want to network on the web?

Perhaps Xing. Sure, 90% of page views still come from Germany, Austria and Switzerland but it has the advantage of working out of Hamburg. And in Germany, data privacy is sacrosanct. And privacy is something that every client wants, not because they have something to hide but because, quite simply, it is something they are entitled to as human beings.

Weasel word - FR > EN: "acteur", He's a real player!

I don't care how many hits you get with "player"; this word makes for a poor translation of the word "acteur".

According to the OED, here is what a "player" means:

1. A sportsperson
2. A confident, successful man with many sexual partners
3. Someone who plays a musical instrument, e.g. a guitar player
4. An actor, as in The Comedy Store Players (http://www.comedystoreplayers.com)

Some translators may be in the habit of using "actor", which seems permissible under OED rules:

Actor - a participant in an action or process: employers are key actors within industrial relations.

So, it's okay to transliterate "acteur" without giving it a second thought. But French loves these abstract words whereas English wants to nail down the concept. How often do you see the word "actor" in the FT unless it's in the arts section?

Another word that comes from the Latin agere, to act, is agent. Sometimes "agent" will fit better than "actor". After all, we talk about an "agent of change".

More poetical translators might also like "movers and shakers". Less lyrically but just as poignant, "prime mover" has more impact as a word in English than "actor".

Other solutions welcome!

FR > EN contrats onéreux > onerous contracts = spotting Frenglish

Often it's so hard to tell when a French expression has been calqued on the English equivalent but this is the case for "contrats onéreux". From Ménard (2004):

Dans ce contexte, l'adjectif onéreux est un faux ami en français. On dit d'un acte qu'il est à titre onéreux lorsque chaque partie doit fournir une contrepartie. L'expression à titre onéreux s'oppose à à titre gratuit.

So "onerous contract" is fine.

Ménard suggests "contrats déficitaires" as the French equivalent.

Editing translations: sorting the sheep from the goats

Time to flag a dodgy business practice that sometimes crops up in the translation world.

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by what I would call a low-end private bank in Geneva which basically said the following:

We are looking for a French> English translator with proven experience (proven by whom?) in legal and financial language...

So far, so good. Then, the punchline:

... to REVISE an English translation of a key document for the Bank. 

Alarm bells. But it's good to stay polite and professional so here's what I replied:


Je vous remercie de votre mail et l'intérêt porté à mes services.

Il ne m'est pas possible de vous faire un devis ni donner un délai pour une révision sans examiner au préalable le document en français et en anglais. Si, par exemple, la traduction actuelle n'est pas de bonne qualité, il s'avérerait plus judicieux de refaire la traduction, tout simplement. 

Je compte parmi mes clients des banques privées genevoises de premier ordre. 

Mon activité principale consiste à fournir des traductions de qualité à une clientèle exigeante.

Je reste à votre disposition. 

So to sort the sheep from the goats, simply ask to see the original text and the brilliant translation that requires your revision skills. The deliberately haughty tone of the email is my way of saying that I'm going to charge you a high fee to absolve you of your sin of choosing a cheap-o translation option (I assume...) in the first place. 

I never heard back... 

Lease vs rental

Here's a useful tweet from Grant Hamilton:

Misstranslation alert: Location d'un véhicule is "vehicle rental" if short term and "vehicle lease" if long term...

FR > EN: "Gestion"

This from Vinay and Darbelnet (Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais: méthode de traduction)

In general, French words are mostly situated at a higher level of abstraction than are the corresponding English words.

This is the most important lesson I learned at university, and it pays to bear it in mind when translating from French to English.

So we come to a term in French, "gestion", which often gets translated as simply "management" in English, much to my disdain and horror.

My erstwhile employer, Oddo & Cie, many years ago changed the name of their fund department, incorporated as Oddo Gestion, to Oddo Asset Management. They got it right.

So when translating financial blurb, if you come across "gestion", don't forget an adjective such as "asset" or "investment" (depending on the company and their legacy texts). Don't simply write "Company A specialises in management"!

Your Company Is Only as Good as Your Writing

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/07/your_company_is_only_as_good_a.html

This is the title of an article from the Harvard Business Review written by the CEO of iFixit. Though applying to technical as opposed to business writing, it still goes to show how important it is that translators are good writers in their native tongue.

Shouldn't you have an in-house team?

Here's an interesting client-education article on the issue of translation quality.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nataly-kelly/ten-common-myths-about-tr_b_3599644.html

I like many of the points but disagree wholeheartedly with Myth 2:

"However, when projects are more complex - involving multiple languages, content types, or file formats - an agency is often a better solution."

Wrong! An agency will never look after your brand image as well as keen, well-rewarded in-house translators (offering as many language pairs as are needed).

This afternoon I was on the phone with a client and he was telling me that the main financial-services group that his Swiss bank is part of uses only agencies, and the quality of the English translations produced is often poor and there is inconsistency with terminology. (The Swiss subsidiary has a fantastic in-house team and you can see that in the quality of the documents.)

Speaking at the Financial Translation Summer School in Spiez this year, Christian Jacot-Descombes made an excellent point about why he has a strong in-house team within his communications department at the Banque Cantonale Vaudoise. From his presentation:

Advantages of having an in-house translation team

- Cost effective: nope
- Faster turnaround times: nope

Real added value comes from the translation product itself:

- more authentic
- better at communicating the message
- more entrepreneurial approach to translation (don't know what this means as I wasn't at the talk but I like the sound of it!)
- improved buy-in from clients

If companies in Europe kept their in-house teams (or re-created them as the case may be), the level of communication in foreign languages would benefit greatly. And so probably would their top line, too.

Straight talking vs. corporatese: financial translators take note!

http://blogs.ft.com/businessblog/2013/07/straight-speaking-vs-corporatese-is-there-ever-a-case-for-fluff-and-double-speak-over-clarity/

Gran Becca

If you asked a Swiss person the location of the Gran Becca, would they say on the Italo-Swiss border?

This is none other than the Matterhorn. It is known as the Mont Cervin in French and the Monte Cervino in Italian. Gran Becca is the name given to it in Aosta Valley dialect (in which region it is partly situated), the largest concentration of native speakers of a francoprovençal dialect.

Quality translations...

This from marketing guru Peter Drucker:

“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.”

Us translators should think about this the next time we purport to offer "quality"

Google Translate

Many non-translator friends have recently quizzed me about Google Translate. Some laud its ease of use and the respectable quality of its input (for a machine). But it has the nefarious effect of commoditising translation — which is something many translation agencies have been doing for years, mind you.

High-end translation services will always look beyond the words on the page to achieve "equivalence". This entails using the most appropriate syntactic structures for the target language in question, editing out detail that would be superfluous in the mind of the target-language reader, and adding in extra information that may be needed to assist comprehension.

Can't imagine Google ever achieving that...

Rue the day

The OED defines this as "bitterly regret".

It relates to the German "die Reue", which gives the verb "reuen", which means to "cause remorse". Someone who is "reuemütig" is remorseful or, if a sinner, repentant.

Of dogs and heatwaves...

Ever wondered why a heatwave is often called a "canicule" (alongside the more ordinary "vague de chaleur")?

In English the term of "the dog days" can be found but it is translated from the Latin dies caniculares. So it's easy to see the relationship with the French term. From Wikipedia:

"The Romans referred to the dog days as diēs caniculārēs and associated the hot weather with the star Sirius. They considered Sirius to be the "Dog Star" because it is the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (Large Dog). Sirius is also the brightest star in the night sky. The term "Dog Days" was used earlier by the Greeks (see, e.g., Aristotle's Physics, 199a2)."

The whole article is worth a read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Days

Enjoy the blistering midsummer heat... and bear a thought for all those poor dogs which, according to the article, were sacrificed to appease the rage of Sirius.

FR > EN: "baromètre économique" > "economic bellwether"

To budding writers out there, please note the spelling as this has nothing to do with "weather" but is related to "Widder" (ram) in German. Literally, "the leading sheep of a flock, with a bell around its neck" (OED).

"Barometer" also works in English but "bellwether" is nicer, and more Germanic...

FR > En: Weasel word - "la relève"

Time for a quick weasel word: "la relève". Many will remember this as one of François Bayrou's election slogans (in 2002?) but it is often hard to translate idiomatically. All depends on context, of course.

For Mr Bayrou, one could have said:

- The New Guard (as opposed to the unbudgeable Chiracian old guard)
- The New Broom (more tongue in cheek)
- Time for a Change
- The Next Generation (to capture all those young votes)

Here is an example taken from Linguee:

Il faut prendre le temps d'être avec nos enfants afin de leur enseigner les valeurs de notre société puisqu'ils sont la relève de demain. 

We have to take time to be with our children and teach them the values of our society because they are the future. 

Here's another example from a press release I translated this week:

Afin de favoriser la relève professionnelle, 72 places de travail sont occupées par des apprentis. 

To ensure an adequate provision of future talent, 72 positions are held by apprentices. 

Perhaps a little "aggressive" but wasn't sure what else to put!

FR > EN: Définir

One of my purchases at the recent translation summer school was Grant Hamilton's compendium of translation tweets (French to English). As I dip into this book from time to time, I'll be regularly posting and commenting on some of them.

First up is translating "définir". Grant rightly points out that "define" is a poor translation and suggests "identify". That "definitely" works. But so does "specify", my personal favourite.

FR > EN: using "ought" to translate "logiquement"

This from a text this morning:

Pullback en cours sur l’ancienne droite de tendance ascendante située à 1644.4 points cette semaine. Un redémarrage baissier doit logiquement suivre.

Pullback under way to breached uptrend line at 1644.4 points this week. Decline ought to resume subsequently.

 The Collins-Robert suggests using "should" as in the following example:

logiquement, il devrait faire beau (« normalement ») :  the weather should be good

"Ought to" and "should" are both noted in the OED as expressing probability but "ought to" to my mind seems closer to the idea of "logiquement", i.e. if logic is to be followed, this "ought to" happen. Moreover, "should" has more meanings than "ought to" so perhaps should not be used when a modal with more restricted meaning is available.

Successful conference in Spiez this year

Congratulations to all the organisers and participants of the summer school in financial translation, held in Spiez this year.

I attended excellent workshops on the translation of fixed-income commentary and marketing materials along with a review of latest IFRS changes. The plenary sessions were also informative; Michel Girardin was especially good, explaining to us how private banking works in Switzerland and making us laugh at the same time: a tall order indeed!

Looking forward to the next summer school (in Brussels next year).

Financial Translation Summer School

I will be attending the Financial Translation Summer School in Spiez, Switzerland, 3-5 July 2013.

More details can be found by visiting http://www.tradulex.info/spiez2013/?lang=en

FR > EN: "tiers" and Sanity Check

Sanity check (introduction and part one)

Recently in my work I've come across the term "sanity check". Judging by the font of wisdom that is Wikipedia, the term is most commonly used in computer science:
A sanity test or sanity check is a basic test to quickly evaluate whether a claim or the result of a calculation can possibly be true. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanity_testing)
.

As this blog is about translation, especially the métier of being a translator, it seems to be a good theme to kick off with in what I hope will be a long-lasting blog run. Blogs have a habit of dying on us and it takes commitment to keep them going!


Third party (French to English)

So "sanity checks" in translation. For the next few blog entries, I'll be applying this term to editing of our own translations. Whenever I go over our work, I often find myself being too indulgent when it comes to the prose of my translation. I leave in words and phrases that are pure "translationese". Perhaps the word exists in English but has a more restricted usage.

Anyway, our tendency is to translate too literally and, to my mind, one such example is the whole business about third parties.

Here's Wikipedia again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_partyThe term seemingly has broad application but is restricted to definite instances. In my opinion, it chiefly tends to occur in legal and insurance-related matters ("third party, fire and theft" being a basic type of coverage for motor insurance in the UK).

My concern as a translator is that the term is used far more widely in French than in English, and recently I've started translating the term "tiers" as an "independent party", an "outside party". To return to the insurance-related example between the brackets, we can guess who the parties are. The first party is the insurer, the second party is the insured and the third party is the guy whose car you've just driven into. Hence, using the term "third party" makes sense here. But very often, it simply doesn't. Indeed, the Collins Robert gives the option of translating "tiers" as "outsider", and has the following example:

Il a appris la nouvelle par un tiers = Somebody else told him the news

So this sanity check no.1. The top quote from Wikipedia describes this process of testing whether a claim is true. In translation, we're checking whether use of a term reflects proper English usage. You're reading through your sparkling prose and you come across an instance where you have translated (tiers) as third party. Is it a legal text? Or about insurance or some other specialist field? If not, my advise would be to choose another, less haughty term.

Comments welcome.