A discussion about translation services, translators, and translation software

In honor of my wife's Polish ancestors, I went looking for a bad translation from Poland today.  My search took me to the website of the Jagiellonian University Institute of Philosophy in Krakow.  The site is interesting in that the translation is almost completely faultless.  But the few faults, especially in the midst of such academic language, make it seem a little, well, creepy.  Let's have a look.

First, I applaud the Institute for having pages in English.  It's clear from the text that the Institute desires a place on the European Union's list of fine institutions that recognize and share credits from other similar institutions.  Several of the English pages have no more errors in language than would the web pages of an American university.  The Main Page, aside from being boring in its length and complexity, was pretty clean translation-wise.  But the page on Regular Studies has several incorrect turns of grammar: noun-verb number agreement, strange word choices, etc.  The clearest example of where it goes wrong is:

"Since the very beginning students are expected to make their own selection of subject to study on the basis of the catalogue of courses provided by the Institute. "  While several verions, are acceptable, I would be comforted by "From the very beginning, students are expected to make their own selection of subjects to study based on the course catalogue provided by the Institute."  That's still very wordy, as is the whole site, but at least it reads well.

In summary, if you want to write for readers of another language, turn the translation, or at least a review thereof, over to an educated speaker of that language, and one unaffected by extended proximity to the source language.