El País has the headline:
El paso de la borrasca por Francia deja decenas de muertos
A proper translation would be:
Tens of people die as the storm passes through France.
But, accurate and valid though that might be, surely it would be more natural in English to talk of ‘dozens’ of people rather than ‘tens’. The article says that at least forty people have died, so the difference between the two words is negligible. There is a difficulty, though. A stroppy and stupid client, of whom the translation business has no shortage, might complain not only that it was inaccurate but that the translator had misread the ‘decenas’ as ‘docenas’. Similarly, an examiner might mark ‘dozens’ as a mistake.
Seeing ‘borrasco’ reminds me that Wuthering Heights is called Cumbres borrascosas in Spanish. ‘Borrascoso’ is a normal Spanish word for stormy, so at a time when the book was set in university exams I received several compositions using ‘wuthering’ to describe the weather: It was a wuthering day or The weather became wuthering.
