Why hire a professional translation service?

(Guest post by Luci Ruas of Translasaurus)

Why hire a professional translation service? The world of translation is a complex one that is often misunderstood. And because the people who need translation services don’t usually have a grasp on how good the service they get is (because they don’t speak the language), it’s a factor that could have a detrimental effect on a business, without the owners knowing why… until someone else points it out!

In this article, I’m going to outline some of the reasons why businesses should hire a professional translation service. I’ll also give you some examples of what happens when they don’t (which range from funny, to embarrassing, to downright business-ruining).

Firstly, what is a non-professional translator?

A non-professional translator is someone who may do translations as a side-hustle because they speak a second language. It could be your aunt’s boyfriend’s sister who spent her year abroad in Spain and could sort you out with a cheap translation. It could even be John in accounting who took a few night classes after he bought his holiday home in the south of France.

Either way, if you’re looking for a cheap/free service provider to just get you by, the result you can expect is what you would get from any non-professional who’d be happy to take a look and charge you a tenner, whether they’re doing your electrics, fixing your car or building you a website. You could get lucky and get a great service, but chances are, you won’t.

What are the two biggest dangers of hiring an unqualified translator?

The person translating doesn’t have the knowledge they need. They don’t understand the other language/culture well enough to transfer the right meaning into their own language.

Culture-specific ideas and traditions pop up all over the place, but if you don’t know what to look out for, you may miss them altogether. This is true for words and phrases, but equally applicable to concepts. Especially when each culture thinks their interpretation is universal.

Here are some examples:

a. What do you expect when you order a coffee?

A British person would probably reply: A mug filled with coffee, topped up with milk.

A Portuguese person would probably reply: An espresso cup filled with strong black coffee.

Now imagine a café serves coffee in Portugal and gets their menu / board translated into English. Café (coffee in Portuguese), of course, can be translated directly as coffee, so someone unaware of this difference would be likely to do just that. An English tourist walking by may be dying for an (English) coffee, and order one, but be presented with an espresso. Would they drink it anyway, screwing their face up at the bitter taste? Or leave it, aware that it’s stronger than what they would normally drink. Would they be asked to pay for it anyway?

If the café owners don’t speak English, it is likely no solution would be reached and the tourist would leave, an unhappy customer.

If only the board or menu had pointed out that they could have a…

“Meia de Leite” – a mug filled with half coffee, half milk, or even a

“Galão” – a glass with an espresso in it (about ¼ of the glass), topped up with milk.

These short explanations may have made all the difference to the tourist’s experience in the café, and their likelihood to return.

Here’s another:

b. How many continents are there?

A British person would probably reply: 7 – Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

A Portuguese person would probably reply: 5 – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas

Imagine a business stating that they have “spices from all 5 continents” in English. Perhaps a British person reading it would ask, “what do you mean by all?” Would they assume Antarctica was included? Would they put their trust in this business when they know something about it is off? Probably not.

The person is translating into a language that isn’t their own, native language.

Now here’s where translation can go really wrong, because generally, no matter how well you speak a foreign language, chances are you don’t speak it as well as all the people whose first language it is. That means when you’re writing (or speaking) in it, it’s much harder to spot a mistake, and even more difficult not to let your first language creep into what you’re expressing.

The number one rule in the world of translation is NEVER translate into a language that isn’t your own. But that doesn’t mean people don’t break that rule left right and centre.

Common Translation mistakes

A linguistic concept that often trips (unqualified) translators up is “false friends”. These are words that sound alike in two languages, but that mean completely different things.

Here are some examples of false friends that often trip Portuguese speakers up when they’re speaking English, some of which could have catastrophic consequences:

What a lousy translation could do to your business

Bad translations can be seen around the world, and no matter how they got there, can end up harming your business more than you give them credit for.

Why?

Because if you have business communications printed / online / on a display, chances are you want people to understand them. If they don’t, your customers are missing out on what you’ve gone to all that effort to say. Whether it’s instructions, or information about your products or services, the barrier created by a bad translation may well stop clients from trusting you, which could damage any relationship you might have been building with them up to that point.

If they’re reading what you’re saying, they’ve already got one foot in the door, so why would you not make sure the words they’re exposed to are exactly what you meant them to read?

Here’s another trade secret:

“A good translation is invisible.”

That’s because if it’s correct and understandable, it’s just an instruction or description in another language. That means that when a translation gets noticed, there’s most often something pretty wrong with it. Here are some examples:

Translations that don’t make any sense

Badly translated Rules

While travelling in Rome in 2012, I was in the queue for the colosseum and noticed there were rules printed in English and Italian above the entrance. One of the rules said:

“It is forbidden to introduce your bicycle to the colosseum.”

And I don’t know whether it was the boredom of the hour-long queue or heat stroke kicking in, but I giggled at that image for a good 20 minutes. Now, when I think of Rome or the colosseum, all I can picture is the ancient structure stretching its hand out, ready to politely greet a bicycle. I doubt that’s the lasting impression I was meant to have of the colosseum.

Badly translated Products

Food is notoriously poorly translated – so much so that the internet is filled with pictures of menus where the name of the food is barely understandable. In Portugal, a standard bad translation is of “chef’s special” dishes, which in Portuguese directly translates as “house-style” dishes. I’ve seen this translated in more ways than I can count, but my personal favourite has to be a cod dish I saw once called “Cod the House”.

Other favourites that were clearly produced by machine translation tools (like Google Translate) include:

“Sleeve Juice” (which should have been Mango juice)

“Understands” (which should have been Goose barnacles)

“Against fillet steak” (which should have been sirloin steak)

Translations that have made the news

Every once in a while, a translation blunder will make the news, which always means one company or other is in for some bad press. From funny to worrying to offensive, here are some of my favourite translation branding mishaps:

Electrolux (a Swedish company) once tried to market its vacuum cleaners in the U.S. with the tag line: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
Gerber baby food company once targeted Africa with packaging that included a picture of a baby. Little did they know that in some African countries, packaging usually has pictures of the product on it, as many consumers can’t read.
When trying to market to Mexico, The Parker Pen Company translated “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you” into “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.” This was all due to the verb “embarrass” in English having a false friend in Spanish (embarazar), which means “to impregnate”!
The American Dairy Association launched the Spanish version of its “Got Milk?” campaign as “Are You Lactating?”
McDonald’s Portugal launched a series of ads advertising “Sundae Bloody Sundae” as a play on the U2 song, without realising the song was actually about the massacre of 1972 in Northern Ireland.

But while the population as a whole has a laugh or shakes their head at some of these terrible mistranslations, I doubt business owners, marketing managers and country reps feel quite the same when their brand comes under fire for blunders like these.

So on that note,

Here are 4 reasons to hire a professional translator*:

*Professional Translator: A translator who has a degree in languages and/or translation, has lived in or had immersive experiences in the countries of the languages they translate out of, ONLY translate into their first language and is preferably part of a Professional Association of Translators.

1. To avoid miscommunications. A professional translator will be able to inform you when something needs clarifying or explaining further, or whether it simply doesn’t work, to ensure your target audience understands it in the right way.

2. To avoid a bad image. Need I say more after the examples above?

3. To save money. Have you ever heard the saying “going the cheaper route may cost more in the long run”?

So many services invest in getting their banners/ menus/ flyers professionally designed and printed, only to have a customer point out that the language on them is wrong. Will the company keep using those incorrect fliers, risking damaging their image? Or fork out to get them all re-printed once they’ve been reviewed by a professional?

4. Because the world of translation is a complex one that is often misunderstood, even by those who try to provide (unprofessional) translation services. Because you simply don’t know what you don’t know, and never does that apply more than to the world of translation.

If you’re in need of professional translation services, or want to find out more, feel free to contact the author, Luci Ruas at info@translasaurus.com, or visit her website at www.translasaurus.com – a translation company that works exclusively with qualified translators who translate exclusively into their first language.

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