
I recently came across the site www.MedinaShop.com, a site that sells traditional Moroccan handicrafts, including furniture, jewelry, and cookware. They have stores in Agadir (in Morocco) and in Paris. The homepage, which is in French, has little flag icons at the top, as do many non-English sites these days, so the reader can go to the versions in English or, in this case, German or Spanish.
For the most part, the translation in English is quite good. The requirements are minimal; most products are shown with their name and cost, and little else. I checked out the FAQ and "Quality Charter" (whatever that means) pages and found them to have very few translation errors, and nothing that interrupts comprehension. Then I got to the "General Terms of Sale" and ran into trouble. Under "Mode and Delivery Period" the translator clearly relied more on a dictionary than on an actual familiarity with English. I offer the most offensive part here:
"The order is directly given to the customer address. If this latter is absent, the conveyor puts a transit note in his/her letter-box that invites him/her to reorganize a parcel handing-over. In this case, the Customer can nominate another person living in the same agglomeration to receive the parcel. He must clearly indicate him/her to the conveyor."
Intelligible? Yes, but why strain? Why not just hand the text to a native speaker of English. I invite German-speaking readers to review that text as well. The Spanish icon, though present, is inactive.





The other day I read through a Japanese brochure advertising a treated water product. The text was printed in Japanese characters as well as plain English - except that the English, like the bad translation you mention in your post, wasn't plain at all. I had to read certain parts several times before I finally understood what the brochure was really saying about its product. So most of the words were probably translated quite literally, but the writing didn't flow and wasn't simple. Why are so many translations like that?
Posted by: Easton Ellsworth | December 8, 2005 12:52 PM | Permalink to Comment