Capita court interpreting contract letting down courts and taxpayers

I'd like to draw attention to this press release on the ITI website:

http://www.iti.org.uk/news-media-industry-jobs/news/544-pi4j-press-release-17-million-lost-in-translation

I heart about this contract with Capital from a friend a couple of years ago. He told me that court interpreters had been "fired" and told that they now had to work through Capita.

This is probably another example of a civil service mandarin trying to compress costs that cannot be reduced: quality interpreting costs money, especially when the stakes are as high as in the criminal justice system!

It's a shameful business and whoever is responsible should be run out of town, although he or she will probably get a year-end bonus regardless of performance plus a gold-plated pension...

Let the buyer beware

Looks like the South African government didn't have too much luck in choosing its language services firm, as attested to by all the funny commentary going round the web in recent days about the "fake" interpret.

Now it looks like the firm supplying the guy has disappeared:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-25345627

Nice laypersons article on the limits of machine translation

I'm particularly glad that the writer emphasises that translations should be elegant.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/25/lost-in-machine-translation-star-trek

Resources for financial translators

Here are main resources which I would recommend for anyone wanting to specialise in financial translation:

• Dictionnaire de la comptabilité et de la gestion financière, Louis Ménard (third edition if you can ever get hold of it in Europe!) for French>English
• Wörterbuch für das Bank- und Börsenwesen, Hans Zahn, for German>English 
• The Council of Europe French-English Legal Dictionary, Frank Bridge (old but useful, the dictionary that is, not Mr Bridge, whose worth I am unable to calculate)
• Subscription to FT.com
• Subscription to The Economist
• Subscription to eIFRS (my latest move), which is vital if you translate the financial statements of any company that publishes under IFRS

Annual report masterclass in Leipzig

Last week I attended a masterclass given by Robin Bonthrone on IFRS and translating annual reports, with a focus on German to English.

A significant amount of time was given over to translation pitfalls. Especially useful was the review of latest IFRSs (especially IFRS 13).

I can recommend Robin's seminars to any translator, seasoned or otherwise, who wants to deepen their knowledge of accounting standards and how they affect us as translators.

FR > EN: "Commuter"

It occurs to me that metropolitan French has no word for "commuter" (please correct me if I'm wrong).

But Swiss French is able to (and does) borrow heavily from German. German helpfully has the word "Pendler", which has been borrowed into Swiss French as "pendulaire"(it already had the adjective "pendulaire" as in "train pendulaire").

The best the Collins-Robert can come up with is "banlieusard", which can also mean a suburban dweller who may or may not have a long commute to work. The dictionary gives the word "navetteur" but I've never heard this before, apart from in the form of "faire la navette".

FR > EN: Rewarding...

When translating the investment term "rendement-risque", perhaps use "risk-reward".

"Reward" tends to be underused in financial translation because we automatically translate "rendement" as "return" (which is correct). Both terms are used by Investopedia, for example:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskrewardratio.asp
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskreturntradeoff.asp

"Reward" just adds a bit of variety.

Hugo Dixon

For my money, Hugo Dixon is one of the best and clearest financial writers around. He cut his teeth on the Lex column in the 1990s then, in 2000, went on to found Breakingviews.com, which was snapped up by Reuters a few years ago.

He is currently "editor at large" for Reuters (whatever that means: perhaps he is entitled to take longer lunches than us mere mortals, or turn his mobile phone off, or become large by way of said long lunches?).

His blog can be visited by going to http://blogs.reuters.com/hugo-dixon/