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.