Golden Rules for Truly Terrible Translations

Sadly, even blue-chip multinationals are capable of producing Truly Terrible Translations. A few recent examples:

1. The oil company producing a safety manual in “Polish” without any diacritic characters, rendering the manual largely meaningless. Well, it is only safety!
2. The IT company that printed its warranty with every single word of “Arabic” printed back-to-front.
3. The machine packaging company whose 1700-word “English” sales brochure contained some 800 errors.

Every language agency can cite numerous examples of Truly Terrible Translations, and consumers have reluctantly become hardened to reading poor quality texts and to being treated contemptuously by the companies that they buy their goods and services from.

Strange how some companies expect customers to pay a premium price for products and services (and then deliver mediocre products and services, as well as Truly Terrible Translations), but they’re not keen on investing in quality services from their suppliers.

So, what are the Golden Rules for Truly Terrible Translations?

Here is our guide to getting it wrong:

1. The companies have got to have a “quality doesn’t matter” attitude to their documentation. For such companies, tenth-rate tripe is more than good enough. They’re out to keep their costs low, and they don’t care about their customers being given trashy documentation.
2. The companies need to employ like-minded staff. Staff who buy into the “quality doesn’t matter” culture without question and who just don’t have the initiative to stand up and say: “This is wrong. We should care about our customers and our image. We should strive for excellence in everything we do.” With points 1 and 2 in place, the path to producing Truly Terrible Translations is an easy one to follow. But here are some more tips to make the “quality doesn’t matter” phalanx squeal with delight.
3. Use a translation tool. This one is really easy: it takes a human tool to trust a translation tool. Online translation (or machine translation) is fine for gist understanding or in-house use, but if you use it for publication you’re a clod.
4. Auction your work on the net. Plenty of sites out there where you can post your projects and eager “translators” will offer to translate your nuclear power station evacuation plans into any language you want for less money than you’d spend on a burger and fries. Why not get your Mexican Spanish files completed by someone in Brazil who speaks Portuguese? Heck, Spanish and Portuguese are sort of similar to each other, and Brazil and Mexico are both in that squiggly looking chunk of land that sits below the USA. Winner!
5. Get it done cheaply by a non-native speaker at a “call-centre” agency. Nothing quite like getting your German translated in India, your French in South Africa, your Swedish in Pakistan. With thinking like this, you could be looking at being one of only 2,478 Vice Presidents at your company within ten or fifteen short years.
6. Phone a friend who knows a bloke who has got a friend whose son/daughter studied French for three years at high school. Brilliant. They’re certain to be able to translate your sales brochure.
7. Get Miles or Miranda to take care of it for you. Yes, the office “linguists” who last year went to Ibiza for a week and hooked up with a couple of really nice Russians are certain to have the language skills you need to get your Ukrainian user manual translated.
8. Leave it to the last minute. This really helps when it comes to “quality doesn’t matter” work: make sure the translator doesn’t have enough time to do the job properly. Put them under pressure and allow them little or no time to sleep or eat. Ensure that they don’t do any relevant research, and certainly don’t allow them time to proofread and refine their work prior to delivery.
9. Make sure your source language text is drivel. If you really want a bad translation, do remember to give the translator a source file that contains lots of spelling errors, lots of grammar errors, lots of inconsistencies, lots of incomplete sentences, and – whenever possible – make sure it is stuffed to overflowing with meaningless marketing or management speak and clichés. Nothing shines a brighter light on “talent” than self-aggrandisement.  Also under this category, do consider sending your translator numerous revised versions of your source text. Remember [1] not to mark the changes (so that the translator has the agony of playing spot-the-difference) and [2] to make each version of the source text worse than the previous version. Perfect!
10. Don’t use a professional translator. Professional translators are highly qualified people. Many are qualified to masters or doctorate level within a subject speciality, as well as having additional qualifications in translation. They’re probably better qualified and better trained than most of the clients they work for. They spend a lot of money on IT hardware, software, reference libraries, professional accreditation and ongoing training. Why would a “quality doesn’t matter” client ever want to work a person who actually knows what they’re doing? Huh!
11. Don’t use a translation agency. What have the translation agencies ever done for you? Just because the good ones initially vet and then monitor their translators on an ongoing basis; just because they get the right translators with the right language and subject skills for each project; just because they spend a lot of time and money on outstanding project management and training; just because they invest in staff and resources; just because they check projects prior to delivery (translators – however good – do make mistakes that agencies have to correct before delivery); just because they work crazily long hours to liaise with clients and translators on different sides of the planet and in different time zones, why, oh why, oh why should anyone ever have the intelligence or foresight to work with a translation agency? Duh!

If you have any more ideas, do let us know using the comment form below.

We’ll be happy to share your rules for Truly Terrible Translations!