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From the beginning, Slovenia has not had enough translators in Brussels. This is still the case. And as anyone who has been here and seen brochures, tourist information, menus, or anything else in English knows, the country is missing skilled translators at home as well.
Here’s a nice example of how sloppy some translations turn out. These instructions are from an appliance bought at Bauhaus:
Exhibit A.
Exhibit B.
You don’t even have to speak Slovene to see that something is off here. “Manufactory service,” for example, isn’t something you’ll find in a Slovenian dictionary. And even anglophilic Ljubljanians wouldn’t say Prosim don’t sprememba to sam. (literally: please don’t change this alone, where the “don’t” is inexplicably left in English.)
All in all, these instructions are almost (but not quite) as awesome as The Ultimate Menu, which remains the undisputed champion of bad translating. Still, we’re gettin’ there.
(Thanks Miran!)
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It’s not so much a matter of missing skilled translators, it’s more that the ones responsible for hiring them are cheap. So they get the nephew who has been studying English at school for 3 years (surely he can translate then!) to do the job. Or worse.
What BeeBee said. Nepotism and the fact that good translators don’t really want to work for scraps, whereas high school kiddies find any sort of money to be mana from heaven.
Plus, the above examples are run through a crappy auto-translator, anyway - what I don’t get is why they don’t at least get somebody to look through them before they go into print. With all these internets, I would imagine that wouldn’t be so much of a problem…
Actually, whoever wanted to get this translated was too cheap to hire a translator. These are classic examples of
unedited machine translation. Slovene legislation requires that manuals of every product sold in Slovenia is available in Slovene. However, it doesn’t specify what kind of Slovene
Actually, Ljubljanščina was the first thing I thought of when reading this. It’s a shame, I don’t have the manual of my very first modem anymore. It was something like “If you have the internal version of the modem, open your harddisk and build the modem in”. Some things could be translated only if you know both the English and the German version of Windows. “Insert the driver disk” is not correctly done with “Inserieren Sie den Treiber in die Diskette”.
Michael, you are doing more for Slovenia than any other native. Drnovšek shoud give you a medal for heroism! u have my vote!
nika
Grega: I think The Law For the Protection of Customers (sorry for this sloppy translation) requires comprehensible Slovenian…
I’ve seen similar Bauhaus translations before and they always look so machine-made :-).
You guys are right. One of the most grotesque things I’ve seen here are certified translators who charge exorbitant rates, hire students to do the work, give them 25%, and then pocket the difference for essentially doing nothing.
That said: I have proofread a lot of texts here and have regularly been horrified at the work of some professional translators. There are quite a few of them who honestly can’t write a single sentence without making a mistake.
Translators are like blogs. Plenty of them out there, but only a handful are really good
But Bauhaus are notorious for their “translations”: If I may, I would like to draw attention to the English translation: “No change by yourself!”
My powers of deduction thus tell me that the original sentence was in German and went somtething like “nicht selbst verändern”!, was translated by Google to English and French, and from those to languages to every other language.
Elementary, my dear Watson!
Cornelius is right — it’s not so much a translation problem as it is a copy-editing failure. If anyone had actually looked at this before it went to print, they would have seen that the work was not complete. It surprises me how few people seems to think of asking a fluent or native speaker to take a quick glance at their quick translation.
Case in point: Croatian culinary history lesson
I usually don’t read the instructions, as what I want to know usually isn’t explained, no matter of the quality of the translation. And: sometimes even texts from native speakers sound crappy, so this isn’t necessarily a sign for quality. But there’s one advantage of such translations: it’s nice to have something which is good for a laugh…
It also happens quite often that a company will part ways with a bad translator as soon as it finds out it’s all crap they are getting for their money. So our high school English speakers may have one or even two opportunities to hand in a bad translation but then they lose the customer. Especially profit-oriented companies wanting to establish themselves in the new European markets can be quite strict about the quality of the translations (there are ways of finding out whether a translation is any good even if you don’t speak the language). Unfortunately, not all of them do.
I searched a bit and found out that Slovenian Customers’ Association received complaints about Bauhaus already in 2006! (Here is the story in Slovenian)
@pengovsky (Translators are like blogs. Plenty of them out there, but only a handful is really good.):
Well, partly correct. There are no real standards to what a blog should look like and as long as people are not paid to write one they can write any crap they want - if it’s crap people won’t really read it anyway.
However, there are not that many translators (at least not what I would call translators). An 18-year-old who always had straight As in English is NOT a translator, a middle-aged English teacher is NOT a translator, people who say “hum, let’s dig up those old dictionaries and earn some holiday money with weekend and evening translations” are not translators. Not necessarily. Translating is far more than just “being good with languages”, it’s about intercultural communication. And that is why machine translations (like the one above) are total nonsense. Or do you know a machine that can reason and be creative?
And the worst thing is - many companies and individuals still don’t give a shit about a well-written/translated text.
Nothing new, just traditional Austrian disrespect for anything slovenian, in this case language. I remember when Bauhaus first opened in Ljubljana, and the salespeople were all austrian, most of them didn’t understand a word of slovenian.
I punish them in the most legitimate and painfull way possible: i don’t shop in Bauhaus. Furthermore, i sometimes go to Bauhaus to see products on display, only to order them online or buy them at another store. Disrespect right back at you, Baushit *spit*.
Rox, language “problems” like you mentioned appear in my opinion at more language-borders than only the Slovenian/Austrian one. How many Croatians speak Slovene and how many (at least of the younger) Slovenes speak Croatian? Same thing applies in general between the francophone / German language border in both directions, I already had severe problems when I tried to sort something out with banka Koper via telephone, because the woman there neither talked English nor German. I’m not sure how many Italians speak Slovene. And there might also be similar problems along the border between Mexico and the USA, for an instance. So I doubt, that in its marrow it’s a special Slovenian/Austrian problem you’re facing here. The more languages one speaks, the better off one is
@dietmar: It’s not about how many languages employees speak. I was talking about a bauhaus store in Ljubljana, where salespeople didn’t speak slovenian. Did you have problems with non-german speaking employees of Banka Koper in Frankfurt? No, you didn’t, because no slovenian bank would send non german-speaking employees to their Frankfurt office. If an employee of a slovenian bank in slovenia doesn’t speak german or english, that is not very good, but at least it’s not totally absurd.
What the baugarbage shitheads do is disrespect pure and simple. They don’t have any respect for anything slovenian and - sadly so - they seem to be getting away with it. Nevertheless, i will continue to boycott bauhaus until they gain some respect for the people they do business with.
I don’t understand why Mr. Pengovsky is so upset about “No change by yourself!”
Maybe I’m missing something (Please! Don’t tell me what; I want to remain a man of my own mystery), but “No change by yourself!” seems the perfect exclamation on one’s t-shirt.
Come to think of it….visiting Mr. Pengovsky’s most excellent of sites, just such an emblazoned t-shirt is what is necessary when perusing the purveying prurient pastiche he offers up.
“No change by yourself!” is what he seems to be suggesting to the photos of the models; he’s the man for that job.
Another point. Straight comprehendible instructions are boring. I don’t want to fall asleep half-way through assembling something and accidentally electrocute myself. If I’ll be electrocuting myself, I want to be at least laughing simultaneously.
The fact that Slovenia has not enough translators has nothing to do with this case.
Bauhaus or Austria has no translator for Slovene (and Croatian). And nobody from Slovenia was used for this job. Nobody from Slovenia, not even strangers living in Slovenia, would produce such crap!
@BBLN: Point taken. I neved wanted to say that anyone can translate. Just the other way around.
@DarkoV: Maybe Michael M. should start a business selling T-shirts with bad translations. The name of the store: “As seen on Carniola.org!”
“But there’s one advantage of such translations: it’s nice to have something which is good for a laugh…”
Not quite in the mood for a laugh, when you’re snowed in, have about ten minutes left to clean the hundred meters from your door to the ploughed street, and the snow thrower wont start up, and you spend about 45 minutes of that sixth of an hour you’ve got left trying like hell to make sense of the Chinglish instructions that came with the goddamn machine. True story, that.
well, the spanish translation seems like if it was done by an on-line translator
For the record, the Czech translation isn’t that good either (although I’ve seen far worse - this one at least looks like it was made by a semi-fluent foreigner rather than Eurotran).