How can I produce a great translation? Take a few tips from previous errors

Hello and welcome to my latest article. This time, I am going to take the opportunity to point you to some of my previous articles, with the aim of trying to help you to produce an excellent translation every time. This brings benefits to you (fewer errors in your translations; improvement in your skills), to the end customer (who will be satisfied and more likely to bring more business to Gengo) and, of course, to Gengo, who will have happier customers and happier translators!

As I have commented before, there are some errors that crop up repeatedly. Some of these are very simple to avoid; for instance, incorrect formatting of your translation. This may mean anything from avoiding adding extra spaces on the workbench to ensuring that your Word document looks the same in layout as the original. See my first article and part 8 for more details – there is also a short mention at the end of part 18. In essence, if you are careful not to hit the spacebar at the end of a segment in the workbench, and you follow the original formatting in a document as closely as you can, not only does your translation look better, but you also avoid getting your score reduced for something easily avoided. Bear in mind that if you are translating from a file it may not be possible to create exactly the same details with your translation: maybe you can’t use the same font, for instance, or you need to decrease the font size itself to fit everything into the same number of pages, but do use bold and italics and the same paragraph formatting, and keep as close as possible to the original look.

A lot of the translations you may see will have errors in the original German. Some of these relate to punctuation and capitalisation, some to spelling. Your job as a translator is not just to copy over the errors, but to eliminate them as far as you can. See part 11 for the article that covers this subject. Customers often submit texts for translation that are not particularly well written and need you, as the translator, to be vigilant and to use your knowledge of the source language as well as your skills as writer of the target language to produce a translation that makes sense (which is, of course, always necessary, but especially so in these cases). If you are presented with a text that lacks punctuation, with no capital at the beginning of the sentence, then it is a simple matter to remedy this: start the sentence with a capital, end it with a full stop (or period in US English) and add other punctuation as required – even split up a long sentence if appropriate. When it comes to errors in the original that you cannot make sense of, for example words that are completely out of place or badly mis-spelled and you can’t even guess at what they really mean, don’t just make a wild stab in the dark. Send a message to the customer, suggesting your best guess if possible, but stating clearly that the text doesn’t make sense. The customer will understand and I won’t mark it as an error. I do read the comments!

Another perennial is literal translations. Sometimes these may make no sense in English, sometimes they might make sense but still sound wrong in translation. See part 2 for a fuller explanation, and part 4 for more detail. A recent example I have seen is:

German:  Smartphone ist mit Protagonistin, auch wenn es weggenomen wurdet

which was translated as:

English: Smartphone is with the protagonist, even when it was taken away

and, I am sure you will agree, may be exactly what the original said, but needs rephrasing in English to, perhaps:

The protagonist always has her smartphone, even after it has been taken away.

As with every translation, the sentence needs to fit in with the context as well as to sound good in English – the above example needs to be looked at in the context of the full text and it is then obvious what it means, so don’t forget to compare each segment with the full text if you are in any doubt.

Another tricky subject is verb tenses, which can be very different in English from German. We have verb tenses that German doesn’t, and we use them differently in many cases. See part 9 and part 17 for examples, and some information on verb agreement. I see quite a number of errors in the past tense; largely, I am sure, because the rules in English about use of the simple past and present perfect are far more rigid than those in German. You can find some additional helpful information on this topic here. Equally, we have a progressive form of the past, present and future tenses, which German lacks. Again, here is a reminder of how these are used. As always, if you search in Google there are plenty of resources you can refer to.

There are, of course, other errors that crop up, even if perhaps less frequently, and I highly recommend you (re-)read not just the articles I have referenced above but also the others: there are 18 in total before this one and unfortunately there is not the space here to go into detail about every one of them.

If you don’t have the time to read all the articles immediately, and to help you decide which article(s) are most relevant to you, here is a summary of the topics I have covered to date:

The little things: including formatting and currency formats

Literal translations

Omitting words/phrases, reading instructions, order of adjectives

Literal translations, DE/EN numbers, currency, dash vs hyphen, typos

Machine translation

Cultural differences

Punctuation

Formatting, being consistent, dialect, which vs what

Hyphens/dashes, prepositions, verb tenses, exclamation marks

Being consistent

Capitals/punctuation

False friends/unreliable translations

This/that, and/or, typos

Literal translations (yes, again!), names and explanations

Denglish

Sentence structure: word order, punctuation

Verb agreement, verb tenses

US vs GB English, extra spaces, capitals, punctuation

As you can see, there is quite a bit of repetition there, which underlines the need to take my comments on board.

In addition, please read and familiarise yourself with the Gengo style guide for US and/or GB English, depending on your qualifications.

And finally, please do comment or ask questions on this or any of my other articles. I do read and respond to these!