No thanks to you...

Right, I'm officially declaring war on "thanks to" being used, especially at the beginning of sentences, to denote a negative cause. A silly example would be

          Thanks to my cancer, I only have one year left to live.

Daft, eh.

The FT wrote today: "Thanks to the decline in CD sales..." when it meant "Owing to..." or "Following..." or "As a consequence of...".

For a fuller discussion, see this useful article:

http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2014/07/thanks-to.html

Professional courses attended

Some translators are in the habit of listing all the seminars they have attended since the year dot.

A recent example got me thinking, and made me realise that, over the years, I've attended a good few events - some of them rather informative.

Here is a selection:

SFT/ASTTI Financial Translation Summer Schools (Paris/Spiez): 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015

German Annual Report Masterclass (Robin Bonthrone) - October 2013

Die Welt der Banken und Ihre Sprache - April 2015

"While" versus "whilst"

There is a definite tendency today to simply use (he says, voluntarily splitting an infinitive!) "while".

A decent summary of the issue is available here:

http://www.richardhollins.com/blog/grammar-tips-while-or-whilst/

However, I was composing a pretty ordinary sentence the other day, and "whilst" seemed a better fit to me:

He will also oversee Acme Corporation's differentiation strategy in terms of its products and services whilst optimising design and construction costs.

(I was having to deal with another one of those long lists in French: "he does a, b, c, d, e, f...". I don't usually allow more than three items in any such list without adding some kind of conjunction.)

Here is the same sentence with "while":    

He will also oversee Acme Corporation's differentiation strategy in terms of its products and services while optimising design and construction costs.

To me, the "while" sounds like he's doing everything at the same time; imagine him spinning plates.

It's almost like "whilst" has a sense of "as well as" in this example.

Of course, the EMT editor at the client may have simply edited out the "whilst" for the more internationally acceptable "while".

To be continued...

Die Welt der Banken und Ihre Sprache

In April, I attended this two-day seminar on the world of banking and the terminology that accompanies it. Organised by the BDÜ in Baden-Württemberg.

The highlight is that the speaker, Holker Schuster, is not a translator by trade (though I'm sure he could turn out some excellent work if he had to). Rather, he is a trained banker whose current area of expertise is trade finance. But he also has a passion for languages and has held high-level management positions within reputable translation companies.

This was the most comprehensive presentation on the business of banking that I've attended in any language.

It'll be happening again next April in Mainz. Herzlich empfohlen!

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.