Saturday, December 13, 2008
You can’t polish rubbish
Werner Patels has an excellent post titled “Bad translations cannot be salvaged” over at his weblog, Translation - Language - Culture, in which he laments getting requests to edit translations with an excessively high “rubbish factor,” a request I imagine most SWET members have had to deal with at some point.
From a translator’s point of view, it is pretty widely acknowledged that you cannot do much to improve a poor translation. There’s really no point is trying to polish up something that is clearly rubbish to begin with; you really need to start over and redo the whole translation from the beginning in cases like that, but it can often be difficult to persuade clients that a retranslation is what they really need, rather than just a bit of editing, or worse, a “native check” (an all-too-common request in the translation business in Japan). What strategies have SWET members developed for (A) avoiding or declining requests for editing work when a retranslation is clearly required or (B) persuading clients to bite the bullet and pay for a retranslation?