Let's begin with a nice quote, ‘Forget the 99.99% you get right, it’s the .01% error that’ll bring a chopper down’.

When dealing with military, engineering, medical and industrial documents, the life of your company and your clients resides in the detail. Over a quarter of APT’s business comes from ‘damaged goods’ – i.e. companies whose product has entered the global market with wince-inducing poorly translated literature. We believe that every translation, from a caption to a catalogue, is an undertaking of trust.

The international arena of translated technical material is an ever evolving language medium, which means that using subject qualified experts is essential. But, if they are non-native translators, they will alienate the company’s target audience in that country’s marketplace.

"When your overseas client receives your product and opens your manual, he is holding your company’s ‘silent ambassador’ – so he’d better speak the language well.", Tim Francis, APT (Bristol).

As an international PR consultancy, BCM have encountered similar issues. For example, a former German speaking client provided regular "English" translations of highly technical press releases that were undertaken in-house as a cost saving excersise. The result was a German (non-native) translation that would have confused even the most clued-up specialist in their technology.

The unfortunate Account Manager had to use a combination of the original "Deutsche Pressemittielung" and the English version to achieve an adequate press release.

This press release would then have to be re-approved by the German engineers, to ensure that the facts were correct before finally distributing the press release.

Now, ask yourself how many hours that takes and compare it to the cost of a professional translation undertaken by your regular translation partner. The sums, the delays involved and the number of stages introduced are undesirable. More importantly, as Tim explained above, the quality and company image is at risk if the work is not completed satisfactorilly.

From a PR perspective, of course, a holistic view is essential. Why spend money and time building a reputation for a company as an international player in PR materials when their product brochures say "We about us" or have completely meaningless translations?

Have you ever had undesirable results from a translation ? One common pitfall is to use the nearest translator and not the best positioned, in particular BCM's experience is that the use of a native speaker is particularly important to get the right results. Over to APT to explain...

Languages are very complex and only well-educated native speakers know all the idioms and grammar, and can write in a style that is correct, fluent, follows standard usage, but can also be creative if necessary, and avoids ambiguities. Most languages have more complex grammar than English, and a foreigner will probably waste a lot of time looking in dictionaries and grammar books, checking whether he or she has used the right spelling, case, gender, verb form or inflection, while a native speaker will usually write the correct form immediately.

Very often, a dictionary will have the word you need, but not the expression or phrase you need. There are many set patterns of words which have to be used, and no dictionary can list all of these. Only an educated native speaker knows which verbs you can use with which nouns, for example, you can ‘write / compile / produce / draw up a report’, but you can’t ‘do / compose / construct / build a report’.

Only a native speaker knows all the slang and possible double meanings of words.For example, a description of a number of people sitting and reading in the reference section of the national library in Paris said that ‘the readers were spaced out at regular intervals’. Instead of simply saying that the room wasn’t very full, this also suggests that these people often take mind-expanding drugs.

After studying a foreign language at school and college for years, most people can only read it well. They won’t speak it or write it like a native unless they have spent years living in the foreign country, using the foreign language all the time. Most foreigners who speak English fluently after living in England for years still speak with an accent, and make more mistakes in writing than in speaking simple sentences. Most documents sent for translation are far more complex than simple greetings and chatting about what you did last weekend.

A foreigner who has studied English for 10 years, living here for half that time, may have a level of ability in English similar to that of a 10-year-old native speaker. Their spoken English is quite fluent, but their attempts to write a legal, technical or financial document would be laughable if they tried, and very often they would not realise what howlers they are making. If you know some technical terms, you might be able to understand a technical text, but you need more knowledge of the subject to formulate sentences that use the right terms in the right way.

An Italian trying to write English, for example, will often assume that a literal translation of the Italian words will be correct, and a dictionary will often give this impression, sometimes only offering a literal equivalent, or listing various options and the non-native speaker won’t know which is right. An Italian might think that the ‘Ministerio dei Alimenti’ should be the ‘Ministry of Alimony’ for example, since that will sound right to him, an official-sounding term, and the dictionary says ‘Alimenti’ = ‘Food; alimony’, but of course it should be the ‘Ministry of Food’.
Another government department is the ‘Ministerio della Sanita / Salute’, for which the ‘Ministry of Sanity / Salvation’ may appear to be a correct English translation to an Italian, but that is in fact the ‘Ministry of Health’ / ‘Ministry of Public Heath’.

There is a particular problem with Italian, Spanish and French, with which the English language shares so many words with the same Latin origin, but they have quite different meanings or usage in English (‘false friends’), and if just one word is wrongly translated, the whole sentence can become meaningless. We also have many words of Germanic origin in English too, and the meanings have often changed.

With unrelated languages, there will also be problems with words that have several meanings in either language, so there is very often no one-for-one matching of terms in the different languages. Almost every word has connotations or associations, and only the native speaker is really familiar with these. Set phrases are often quotes from a work of literature, a standard legal or religious text, or maybe a popular song or TV programme. The non-native speaker will be implying and referring to all sorts of things without realising it.

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Translation is a challenge in technical and industrial organisations, due to the specialist nature of a your company's product or ...   more »