ASTTI Financial Translation Summer School

I'll be attending this event in July. It is held every two years in Spiez.

Always an excellent opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. (No, this is not an advert for a dating site but we translators don't get out much so these kinds of get-togethers are highly prized among us.)

There's a considerable amount of good stuff for into-English operatives. Look forward to attending the workshops.

Here's the link for those who are interested:

http://new.astti.ch/web/Sommeruniversitaet_281_3.php

Usually versus regularly (guest post by my colleague Hanna)

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.

Informative article in The Economist on the translation industry

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21642187-technology-may-not-replace-human-translators-it-will-help-them-work-better-say-what

I'd agree with the premise that technology is our friend. Here we use SDL Studio 2014 on all our translation assignments.

GE > EN: Adverb or adjective (guest post by my colleague Hanna)

Dissecting complex German sentences can sometimes be tricky, and one recurring difficulty is distinguishing adverbs from adjectives. 

Take the following example:

“Der prinzipiell stufenlose Gradient wird in konkret quantifizierbare und diskrete Kategorien unterteilt.”

In this sentence, prinzipiell and konkret are adverbs, but their form is the same as an undeclined adjective. (Yes, I know, prinzipiell isn’t generally used as an adjective in German, but it looks like one.) 

Alas, German adverbs don’t come with that handy “-ly” suffix to distinguish them from adjectives. But a bit of grammatical analysis will help clear things up.  Notice that the adjective following the first bolded adverb (stufenlose) ends in –e. This is because it has been declined for the masculine definite article der.  If prinzipiell were an adjective, it would have that same ending.  This logic applies to konkret as well, which should carry an –e ending if it were an adjective qualifying die Kategorien (as are quantifizierbare and diskrete).

Punctuation is also a clue in this case. If the author is careful about punctuation (which I’ve not always found to be the case), then the adjectives should all be separated by commas. As there’s no comma between prinzipiell and stufenlose, nor between konkret and quantifizierbare, we are likely dealing with adverbs.

This seemingly trivial distinction between adjectives and adverbs has repercussions for translation.  Had these two words been adjectives, the sentence above would have been translated:

“The principal, continuous gradient is sub-divided into concrete, quantifiable and discreet categories.”

When they’re treated as adverbs, the sentence changes slightly:

“The generally continuous gradient is sub-divided into concretely quantifiable, discreet categories.”  

The nuances may seem very fine, but they’re important.  The ability to correctly identify and translate adverbs will turn a good translation into a more precise, polished one.

Translating from French in Switzerland: the case of the "taux plancher"

Many have observed the "shock and awe" shenanigans of the SNB in recent weeks, with the removal of the "taux plancher" against the euro.

How should we translate "taux plancher"?

"Floor rate!" exclaims everyone unanimously.

In German, it is "Mindestkurs".

Thing is, in Switzerland, German is the majority language (in writing, that is). So perhaps instead of saying "floor rate", we should be saying "minimum exchange rate" - which is incidentally the term I've been hearing most often on US financial news channels recently.

"Interest rate floor" seems to be a common term, but "floor (exchange) rate" is starting to look very much like translationese... To make matters worse, the term "cross-currency floor" exists but looks more like an options-based strategy than anything else: http://www.investment-and-finance.net/derivatives/c/cross-currency-floor.html

Another solution is to see the "floor" as a cap against appreciation in the Swiss franc: "the SNB removed its currency cap and let the franc float freely..."

Financial Translation Summer School in Spiez this year

This is always an excellent event. Smart combination of good seminars, nice food and a breath-taking location!

http://new.astti.ch/web/ASTTI_Financial_Translation_Summer_School_SAVE_THE_DATE_424_3-1.php

3rd edition of "Le Ménard"

At long last, I've got my hands on the third edition of the "Dictionnaire de la comptabilité et de la gestion financière" by Louis Ménard et al.

Only took my 2 1/2 years from the date of publication in Canada!

Thoroughly recommend getting hold of the CD-ROM. Shame there's no Mac interface but you can't have your cake....

Exclamation marks and "over-punctuating" in French

It's reporting season so I'm translating a considerable amount of analyst commentary on corporate earnings.

When a figure is startlingly good, it is often followed by an exclamation mark.

As writers of English, our initial reaction might be simply to drop the "!". But I'm concerned that we may be loosing a nuance. Example:

Des prises de commandes en hausse de 5.2% pour 2013, dont 20% a/a at T4 !

I translated the last part of the sentence as:

... with a 20% surge in Q4 2013.

(Don't worry about specifying the year-on-year (a/a); it is automatically understood in the Anglosphere).

We must get rid of the extra punctuation but we need a nice powerful noun to avoid loosing some of the original's meaning.