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.