Днес колежката Анита ми изпрати тази статия свързана с ежедневието на всеки translation project manager (ръководител проекти в преводаческата сфера). Написана е на наистина много цветущ английски и мога да кажа - колеги, enjoy! Hilarious, but insanely true!
Just some excerpts to give you an idea...
"There’s a lot of humour in the translation business—and that’s before you even start reading machine translations (always good for cheering one up in times of despair...)"
"...some clients are surprised to discover that there are dictionaries (shock horror!) involved in the process. I’ve lost track of the number of times that—daring to mention that I’d like to consult a dictionary—I’ve been asked “Goodness, don’t you know all the words—I thought you spoke fluent French?”
"Or the Spanish document (needed by tomorrow, por favor) which purports to be “just a couple of pages” but multiplies miraculously in cyberspace to become twenty pages. Not to mention the “oh, it’s not at all technical” text which, when it eventually sneaks its way into the Project Manager’s inbox, proves to be so jam-packed with jargon that it’s difficult even to identify the source language as English... "
"...the “Friday Special” syndrome—you know, that legal document which the client has pushed around his desk all week, only to produce it triumphantly at 4 o’clock on Friday afternoon. Of course it’s highly specialised, is required as soon as possible, and they want it in Kikongo (isn’t that a dance?) and Chinese. By some freak accident of the international calendar, it just so happens to be the Chinese New Year, so you know—even before picking up the phone— that finding any sort of Chinese translator over the weekend is going to be like searching for hens’ teeth. And finding one who happens to be a legal specialist to boot, is going to make the hens’ teeth search appear an easy option."
"But the most insidious type of list are “word strings”—lists of “out of context” phrases which feature the additional “bonus” challenge of character restrictions. As anyone who’s been haunted by the spectre of character restrictions can testify, translators often have to perform a series of linguistic acrobatics to render even the simplest source sentence correctly within the specified number of letters and spaces."
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