.

Awful, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Why, it’s almost bad enough for engrish.com (if only it came from Asia). But that isn’t what has me so outraged. This is:

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SAY WHAT?

So not only are they botching their own English presence; they’ll be happy to botch your company’s, too!

I am doing my best to assume the agency is simply clueless and doesn’t realize their translator’s English is so godawful AWFUL. That bodes poorly for their competence, but it’s better than the alternative, which is that they know they suck but are betting you won’t.

Either way, let this be a warning to all Dutch companies: this is far from the only marketing agency in the Netherlands that has not, in fact, mastered English.

.

.

If you don’t see why these are examples of awful English, please be very careful when you select someone to provide your English content. I can’t emphasize that enough. Don’t just trust what people say about themselves; ask someone you trust whether their English is up to snuff. Please. PLEASE.

Okay. Let’s rewrite the first offender, first in actual English, then in actual English that works:

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Now, I don’t know how many employees or years of combined experience the company has, and I had to guess what their USP is from the content on their website. Also, it’s 2014, so I dropped the “OMG Internet scary” vibe in the original. (Is there any Dutch company still unfamiliar with the world of the Internet?) So I don’t know if the text on the right is a perfect fit for this agency—I’d have to talk with them first. But it sure as hell makes me think they’d be worth calling if I needed an online overhaul.

And because I just can’t help myself:

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Here’s the text on the “About us” page:

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Alas, this is representative of the entire site—including the product pages:

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Leaving aside the language mistakes, there is a serious issue here: the device is both a monitor and a defibrillator, but this description only addresses the former function. I suspect the company meant “anticipate automatically according to protocol” to tell the reader the device also defibrillates . . . but that phrase doesn’t accomplish the goal, at least not for this reader. And because the website is so generally incoherent, I’m left wondering whether the “defibrillator” in the title is an error in terminology—like “myocard infarct”—instead of an accurate descriptor. Is the device actually a fibrillation monitor?

And if I bought it from them, would we even be able to communicate when I needed service?

This unclarity might not hurt you if you’re the only cardiac equipment company around. But if you have competitors, you can’t afford to leave potential customers confused about your products and your service. And this company has plenty of competitors: a quick Google search turns up several in the Netherlands alone. (Since they’ve taken the trouble to create a complete English version of their website, I presume our company is courting customers beyond the Netherlands’ borders.)

What truly boggles the mind is that they didn’t just use the manufacturer’s own English product description:

.

It isn’t perfect text, but it’s several orders of magnitude better: I know what this device does! More subtly, I believe the people selling it know what it does, too—purely because they sound like they do. Thanks to the mangled English on its website, our poor example company doesn’t even sound like it has an IQ.

Granted, I’m not the intended reader; the target audience are emergency medical responders and hospital professionals who may be able to see the cardiac forest through the poorly worded trees. But with dozens of sales-and-service providers to choose from, those professionals can afford to shop around. That makes clear, competent language an important differentiator.

That’s all for this installment of The Devil Is in the Detail. Please join me in October for round three!

Thanks to illustrator Tom Burns for permission to use his design. Click to see more of his work.

It’s an appealing thought, writing your own English content. You’ve spoken the language for years; you use it every day in your business. And you know, better than anyone else, what you want to say.

Yet chances are it’s a terrible idea.

Why? Because there’s a big difference between proficient and native. Take me: Even after twenty years speaking Dutch and twelve living in the Netherlands, my Dutch still lags behind my English. Chances are your English, like my Dutch, will sound a wee bit flat. Not wrong, but . . . a little stilted. Not what a gifted native speaker would write. That’s not a comment on our language prowess; it’s a simple fact of second-language-ism. Our vocabularies, our senses of nuance and emotion, are usually far deeper and broader in our mother tongues.

That’s true, up to a point. But when the errors start to stack up, even the most forgiving reader is likely to turn away—even in informal venues. Why? Because poor grammar and punctuation signal unprofessional.

If they’re that sloppy with their own stuff, the potential client thinks, how careless will they be with mine?

This new post series, The Devil Is in the Detail, will present concrete examples of English that’s missing the mark on professional Dutch websites. Below, a sample from my own profession to kick off the series. Enjoy!

(Click on the images to enlarge.)

THE ORIGINAL WEBSITE TEXT

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Notes

Non-native giveaways, aside from the two errors: the use of the passive voice, the Of course (you can feel the natuurlijk it came from), the general clunkiness of the second and final sentences.

(Sadly, these could also be evidence of a sloppy, lazy native-speaker translator. It’s so much easier to translate literally than to translate effectively.)

AFTER FIXING ERRORS ONLY

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Notes

Now we’ve got a text without outright errors, but it’s still a long way from clear, fluid English.

AFTER ENHANCING READABILITY

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Notes

To me, loyal makes it about you; steady makes it about them. That is: loyal = I can count on needy you to come back to wonderful me with more work, so I will reward you like a good dog; steady = I appreciate all the work you choose to place with me and you are a preferred client of mine, so I am giving you extra service.

Technically, large businesses sell to customers and independent professionals sell to clients; besides, clients sounds more upscale. People like to feel they’re upscale.

IF THIS WERE A REAL ASSIGNMENT . . .

All this reads much better, but I don’t think it’s perfect. For one, I think the point that they USE the glossary is a silly one. Of course they use it. Why else would they compile it? But that’s what they wrote, and a translator has to assume the author made precisely the points she intended to make. (That’s why it’s so important to write great source text in the first place.)

If this were a real assignment, I’d have a conversation about that point. I’d suggest writing something like this instead:

Here, I chose top-notch instead of excellent for its added nuance; to me, top-notch says this is even better than the excellence you’ll find elsewhere.

I’d also discuss why my client doesn’t charge extra for rush jobs, because nothing about the Internet makes it possible to receive a four-thousand word document at 4 PM and return it the next day at noon without working through your evening. I’m guessing this is a holdover from when e-mail was New and Exciting and So Much Faster Than Paper. I’d advise my client to scrap that line in favor of something about worldwide network of translators and 24/7 coverage, if it’s true. Otherwise I’d advise them to drop that section entirely. (And start charging extra for rush jobs, but that’s a different conversation.)

That wraps up the first installment of The Devil Is in the Detail. Please join me in March for round two!

Sources: Grammarly quote

Oh, yeah? Well, your maman wears le combat boots!

This is what happens when a monolingual advertising team discovers a product is being marketed in a bilingual country.

“Hey, Bob, I just had a great idea for the Coke water vitamin Canada thing.”

“Uhuh.”

“You know how they speak two languages in Canada? English and, um, what’s the other one—oh, yeah: French?”

“Uhuh.”

“How about we put a bunch of English words in one bucket, and a bunch of French words in another bucket, and we pick one word from each bucket blindfolded, and we print them on the caps? Won’t that be exotic? Won’t that be awesome?”

“Uhuh.”

“Sweet. Glad you think so, too. HASHTAG TOO COOL FOR WORDS!”

Coca-Cola apologized for the mishap.

Of course, plenty of folks think they write well. Evidence of this mass delusion is strewn across the Internet—and not just on personal blogs. Company websites are filled with it. Academic papers are filled with it. Government reports—no; best not to get me started on those.

Discontinuation of this item is result of our inability to source manufacturing to support the distribution and supply of this product on a consistent basis within the quality standards we require.

Regardless of the type or scale of business you operate in, you need the help of marketing if you are going to make said business a success, but the question that remains now is do you know how to effectively do this?

This change will allow us to better leverage our talent base in an area where developmental roles are under way and strategically focuses us toward the upcoming Business System transition where Systems literacy and accuracy will be essential to maintain and to further improve service levels to our customer base going forward.

If any of these sound remotely okay to you: do not write your own corporate content.

Renato Poggioli said, “The gifted translator is an alchemist who turns one piece of gold into another piece of gold.” If your text reads more like a piece of lead (or, perhaps, dung), don’t expect your translator to magically read your mind and turn it into the text you wanted to write. Good translators will make a convoluted text sound much better in the target language, but there’s a limit to the wonders they can work while staying true to the original—which is a holy commandment in the field of translation. Give a translator illogical garbage, and you’ll get illogical garbage back. Prettier garbage, to be sure, but beneath the streamlined prose it’s still rotting fruit and soiled diapers.

So if you want clean, fresh content that smells good in the English language, first hire a gifted writer in your language.

Sources: [1], [2], [3]

There’s no need to fight; the world of dialect is big enough for both of us.

This summer, BBC News Magazine published a list of fifty Americanisms creeping into UK English. The British broadcaster compiled its list from thousands of examples sent in by readers. But the list is a little disingenuous.

Many of the entries are, indeed, perfectly acceptable educated American forms that sound ill-begotten to the British ear—or should that be ill-begot?* But there are several entries whose ugliness resides elsewhere.

Some of them are just  terrible language, period. We don’t like them any more than the British do:

2. The next time someone tells you something is the “least worst option“, tell them that their most best option is learning grammar.

40.I am increasingly hearing the phrase “that’ll learn you” – when the English (and more correct) version was always “that’ll teach you”. What a ridiculous phrase!

41. I really hate the phrase: “Where’s it at?” This is not more efficient or informative than “where is it?” It just sounds grotesque and is immensely irritating.

43. My pet hate is “winningest“, used in the context “Michael Schumacher is the winningest driver of all time”. I can feel the rage rising even using it here.

50. “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they’re trying to say.

Others are no worse than the jargon the British are trying so hard to root out of their own government communications:

9. “Touch base” – it makes me cringe no end.

21. A “heads up“. For example, as in a business meeting. Lets do a “heads up” on this issue. I have never been sure of the meaning.

33. I hate the word “deliverable“. Used by management consultants for something that they will “deliver” instead of a report.

35. “Reach out to” when the correct word is “ask”. For example: “I will reach out to Kevin and let you know if that timing is convenient”. Reach out? Is Kevin stuck in quicksand? Is he teetering on the edge of a cliff? Can’t we just ask him?

45. Having an “issue” instead of a “problem”.

Its fanny packs (8), math (36), and zees (46) aside, educated American English is not to blame for these exasperating additions to the English lexicon. We’d like to drown them in the Atlantic, too.

* “15. What kind of word is ‘gotten’? It makes me shudder.”

Pricing your projects accurately can be a puzzle.

Per-word rates are ubiquitous in translation, and until recently they were my metric for pricing projects, too. But I kept butting up against the fact that two translations of the same length and apparent level of difficulty were taking vastly different amounts of time. One had lucid, straightforward writing, while another turned out to ramble and veer into frequent official-speak. One was simple, flat text, while another turned out to have tables I couldn’t edit and footnotes with some kind of weird formatting that kept going wonky on me.

I could compensate on one-off projects by adjusting the per-word rate I offered, but I was noticing this phenomenon even on different projects for the same client—and because I was giving my clients a single per-word rate at the start of our relationship, my effective earnings per hour spanned a significant range (most of which fell under my “need to earn” value).

So I’ve finally moved away from quoting clients per-word rates. I now price each project on its own merits.

Fixed vs. actual price

I give clients two options: I can quote a binding price before the project, or I can invoice the actual price after the work is done. I point out that the second approach almost always costs less because I’ll only bill them for the effort I actually spend. When I quote a fixed price up front, I have to pad my estimate with a margin of error, in case this turns out to be that once-every-so-often project from hell.

Most clients, new or repeat, want some control over how much a project is going to cost, so even if they don’t want a binding price up front, they do want an estimate. Obviously, you don’t want to lowball it. That makes for cranky clients who may decide to complain about you in public and take their next project elsewhere. But you don’t want to induce unnecessary sticker shock, either. That means you need to get very good at assessing how long a project will take you.

Repeat after me: assess then track, assess then track, assess then track

There are two parts to accurate estimates: (1) you have to spend the (unpaid) time to thoroughly assess each project before you begin, and (2) you have to track how long each project actually takes.

Occasionally you’ll mess up and seriously underestimate; it’s key to note what went wrong in your records, to help you plan better the next time a similar project comes along. When this happens, I suggest charging the client what you estimated and swallowing the difference as a learning experience.

Sometimes the actual price will be much higher because the client changed the text halfway through or found more text they wanted you to translate or called you once because Hans in sales who spent three years in the States didn’t think you used the word accentuate correctly and then called another three hundred and ninety-nine times for other “errors” Hans found—in short, because this was, indeed, that project from hell. When this happens, charge them in full, and explain why. Sure, they might get bent out of shape, but did you really want another assignment from this client? Exactly.

How I estimate project prices

[ 1 ] How many words per hour do I expect to achieve? If I’ve done a 300-word sample translation for a new client (which I routinely offer so they can decide whether I’m the right fit), then I have actual data to work with. I look through the entire document to see if the rest is in some way more (or less) difficult, and adjust accordingly. If I don’t have sample-translation data, I use my average for past similar projects. Then I take the total number of words divided by the estimated words per hour and round up to the nearest whole number to give me T, the number of hours initial translation should take me.

[ 2 ] I count up the number of figures I can’t edit directly, sections with fiddly formatting, and so on, and divide that by two (and round up). That gives me F, the number of hours I expect to spend on difficult formatting elements.

[ 3 ] If the document is on paper I divide the number of pages by 300 and round the answer up to get S, the number of hours I’ll spend scanning it in.

[ 4 ] If I need to perform OCR on the document, I add one hour: O.

[ 5 ] I divide T by 3 and round up to get E, the number of hours I’ll spend editing the translation.

[ 6 ] I divide T by 10 and round up to get P, the number of hours I’ll spend proofreading the final document after my client’s DTP provider has formatted it. (I always insist on proofing the very final document to make sure no one’s just fixed this one little thing and introduced errors.)

[ 7 ] If this is a binding price quotation, I add up all those numbers and add ten percent as a margin for error.

[ 8 ] I multiply the sum of all these numbers by my hourly billing rate H to get a project price N:

N = H * ( S + P + E + F + T + O ) for estimates

N = H * 1.10 * ( S + P + E + F + T + O ) for binding quotes

[ 9 ] I figure out the minimum I am willing to do this project for. I think this is an important step. Some projects make me go “ugh” and droop my shoulders when I see them. What price would perk me up enough to be glad to do that job? Other projects make me drool in anticipation. How unhappy would I be if that job didn’t go through because of price? I adjust the number I got in step 8 to reflect this. Now, if the client for Unfun Project A says, “Great! You’ve got it,” I’ll be glad. And if the client for Awesome Project B says, “Sorry, that’s just too much for us,” I won’t be sad. Well, not very.

It’s important that I do step 9 after I’ve done the other steps. Step 8 gives me an accurate price based on an assessment of the work involved; this is the fair market price for my work, the price I would charge any client for that amount of work. Without that baseline, it’s hard to usefully gauge in step 9 what a project is worth to me.

What I don’t charge for

You might note that my estimate doesn’t include anything for time spent discussing the project with the client. I consider the project briefing and discussion of the translation after delivery part of the service I offer (as is answering the occasional “Hey, I need to write to this distributor in Kansas, can you check these two sentences for me?” request). When I invoice based on actual cost, I clock that time for my records, but I don’t bill it to the client unless it becomes excessive.

You could take a different approach and specify D hours of project discussion in your estimates, but I think the only benefit is to help cover your ass in billing clients from hell. Most clients don’t abuse your time by demanding incessant, petty changes, and I prefer that mine feel they can always call me without a meter running. To me, being available for my clients’ questions is part of being a top-notch service provider.

Sorry, folks: it really, really, really doesn’t work this way.

A recent article in Dutch news weekly Elsevier highlights a widespread misconception about the translation profession. The article is titled “Risky Translation,” and its tagline is “Google Translate: ultra-convenient for quick translations. But be careful with your secrets.” (*)

No argument here on the second statement, but the first one is troubling—and later in the short article, things only get worse:

[E]ven if a company hires a translation agency for sensitive information, things can still go wrong. “Translators are sometimes pressed for time and turn to the conveniences that technology provides. Even if it’s just to get a basic idea of the text, the text to be translated is often run through an online automated translator first. The quality may leave much to be desired, but it’s a good place to start,” says Pawel Walentynowicz.

My first thought: I won’t be hiring Mr. Walentynowicz for any translations.

I don’t doubt that there are translators who run an entire text through Google Translate first. I know there are; I’ve had to redo their work before. What the editors of Elsevier don’t realize is that Mr. Walentynowicz’s statement is only true of hacks and the egregiously misinformed. No decent translator is ever going to run a text through Google Translate or Babelfish or any other machine translator “to get an idea” of what’s in it. I mean, come on: they speak the language the text is written in! They already know exactly what it says. How could machine translation improve on that?

The answer to that question points to the essential misconception in Mr. Walentynowicz’s statement and the article as a whole: the belief that machine translation always produces non-negative results—that what comes out, while perhaps not perfect, is always better than nothing. While machine translation may be better than nothing for someone who doesn’t speak the language in which the text is written, it’s equivalent to starting at negative eleven for a professional translator. As any translator who’s had to proofread poor translations knows, it often takes longer—and produces less satisfactory results—to fix a bad translation than to start over and translate from scratch. And machine translation is still the reigning emperor of poor translation.

Don’t believe me?

Note in particular how GT introduces an error into the third sentence: Partly because I attended a workshop on money. The author wrote that she attended a workshop because money made her miserable. The GT text says that money made her miserable because she attended the workshop.

Like I said: negative eleven.

(*) The article was written in Dutch; all quotes are my unofficial translation.

Look! It’s a flock of language professionals, traipsing through the Dutch countryside.

The day’s program had two parts: a walk, starting at 11 AM, and a 1 PM falconry show followed by high tea. The venue was the Heerlijkheid Marienwaerdt estate outside Utrecht (a conveniently central location; SENSE members come from all parts of the country).

I was fortunate enough to snag a ride in another member’s car, so I got to meet two fascinating fellow SENSErs on the way down. We arrived under cloudy—but not rainy!—skies, and soon about three dozen editors, translators, copywriters and significant others began a fast-paced trek through the Marienwaerdt countryside. The sun gradually broke through as we passed cows, irises, birds, and quite a lot of tall grass. Oh! And stinging nettles, to the dismay of at least one walker optimistically clad in shorts.

Those claws—and, I imagine, that beak—are quite sharp.

Despite our brisk pace, the walk took longer than planned, and we arrived at the green outside the Marienwaerdt restaurant shortly after one. Happily, the show was not yet underway, and we had time to greet the SENSErs who had arrived for the afternoon program. The falconer took his owls, falcons and buzzard through their paces, soaring to nearby rooftops and back again. The birds were a huge hit with the restaurant’s youngest visitors, and soon a crowd of children gathered with us to cheer on cheeky James (who took his time deigning to heed his master’s orders). Several audience members volunteered to serve as James’s perch, and one brave little girl let her legs play tunnel to James’s low-flying plane—generating squeals of delight and, I imagine, terror. (Or am I projecting?)

If only my stomach were bigger.

To all good things comes an end, and so too our time with James and his companions. Around 2:30 PM, we SENSErs traipsed inside for a gloriously eye-catching and lip-smackingly delicious high tea, made all the better by  leisurely conversation with like-minded language perfectionists.

The Summer Social was an absolutely fabulous introduction to SENSE, and I look forward to many more events.

Divided by a common language?

A friend just tipped me off to this fascinating set of maps depicting language differences across the U.S. I’m from eastern North Carolina, and the data ring true for me—except for map number 19. The devil beats his wife in eastern NC, too.

Map number 10 clarifies one of the great confusions of my childhood: my father’s family said PEE-can while my mother’s said pee-KAHN. I get flustered to this day pronouncing that word.

One phenomenon that map number 11 doesn’t reflect, perhaps because it no longer holds true: when I was growing up, our generic word for a soft drink in eastern NC was Pepsi rather than Coke. New Bern, North Carolina was the birthplace of  Pepsi-Cola and just a hop, skip and a jump away from Washington, where I grew up. (We always called it Little Washington, by the way, because, you know, someone might have gotten confused and thought we meant the national capital nearly three hundred miles away.)