At one point or another, every translator has worked on an incredibly tight deadline. When it happens, it’s easy to race through the text on autopilot, translating one to one without stopping to check whether the English truly conveys the intended meaning or even makes sense.
I discovered a fitting example of this recently while working with a legacy translation that, I assume, had been produced in a race against the clock. The text, which discussed the customer’s code of ethics, contained the following sentence:
Le contenu de ce Code rappelle, précise et complète les dispositions législatives et réglementaires et les usages et meilleures pratiques déontologiques habituellement observés en France.
The legacy text had translated it as:
This Code states, specifies and supplements the laws and regulations and the best ethical practices usually observed in France.
Aside from the fact that précise is more adequately translated as “explains,” the real problem here is the adverb “usually.” Its use unfortunately implies a certain laxity in the application of ethical practices. A better translation would have been “regularly,” as in:
This Code states, explains and supplements the laws and regulations as well as best ethical practices regularly observed in France.
The slippery difference between “usually” and “regularly” is something that requires a native speaker’s intuition to grasp—another reason to translate only into your native language.
