Translations

Anybody who's been living as an expat for a while has plenty of foreign language mishap stories. Lots of them are related to interpreting (oral rendering of one language into another) rather than translation (doing the same in writing).

Here's an interesting article about being careful to choose a good translator.

It begins:

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When Alain Thienot, a professor of business administration at a French engineering school, decided to translate a classic French finance text into English for his international students, he bought a top-rated computer translation program to do the job, rather than hire a translator.

Among hundreds of errors, the program produced a document that translated the French word "entreprise" as "undertaking," rather than company, and "frais" as "fresh air" instead of fees or expenses. A frustrated Thienot had to labor five hours a day during his summer vacation to correct "so many stupidities," he said.

Unquote

I had a similar thing happen to me once; someone hired me to "fix" a document which he had created using one of those computer translators. (Translating from English to French. I was supposed to tweak the French a bit.) The resulting mess was so dreadful that I just had to start from scratch.