Noch einmal davongekommen

This makes TV shows dubbed in German so unbearable. Says the character (figuratively): “I feel like we dodged a bullet.” Says the character in German: “Irgendwie ist es, als wären wir einer Kugel ausgewichen.” If I flag it, I am certain the German studio will defend it tooth and nail, misdirecting with insinuations that nobody in California knows German well...

Frozen

Who would have guessed that it is the movie industry that seems to revert the race-to-the-bottom trend in foreign-language localization? The same industry that is notorious for nonsensical translations of movie titles? Well, “reverting” is maybe an exaggeration, but read the Rebecca Keegan article ‘Frozen’: Finding a diva in 41 languages, which appeared in today’s...

Invisible

Some weeks ago, Über-Setzer-Logbuch had a post on the translation (well, if you can call it that) of movie titles into German. Indeed, many of the “translated” movie titles have no connection anymore with the original. One of the often-cited examples is the 1980’s movie Nine to Five, which ended up with the German title Warum eigentlich… bringen wir den Chef nicht um? or...

Changes To Payment Model

I received an e-mail from a British translation agency which shall remain unnamed. It looks like I’m in their translator database although I cannot find any record of ever having invoiced them. But things change quickly in the language services field, and they may have bought a company I actually did work for in the past – who knows. There are so many things wrong with this...

#TCDinDC

This is the Twitter hashtag for the mid-year conference of ATA’s Translation Company Division in Washington, D.C. this last weekend. For the first time, the TCD conference had a separate track for freelance translators. As TCD Administrator Rina Ne’eman pointed out in her opening remarks, it was also the first time an ATA event took place in a shopping mall – in the Chevy Chase...

Adjectival Reticules

The subject of parsing and how difficult it sometimes is to parse English sentences has come up a couple of times in this blog. One of the most annoying things when translating English text (and perhaps only American English, I don’t know) are compound structures where it is not clear which element defines which. I now found out that The Economist calls them “adjectival...