Last week I did a translation of advertising copy for a small luxury item for personal use (for professional reasons I can’t be more specific). It is aimed at women and the text was written in a lush, romantic style. Today it came back. The client wasn’t happy and had made his ‘corrections’.
- First, my fount of inspiration had become a source of inspiration. Well, source is a perfectly correct translation of fuente; indeed it is the standard form. But in view of the style of the whole piece I thought that fount would meet the case better. The Concise Oxford agrees, defining it as: 1 a source of a desirable quality. 2 poetic/literary a spring or fountain.
- The punctuation had been messed about. Punctuation is variable, but it varies differently in English from Spanish. In particular, in Spanish it is heavier than in English and is often ‘oratorical’, i.e. it marks points for breathing in speech rather than grammatical structure. It is normal in Spanish to see a comma between a long subject phrase and the verb, or at the start or end, but not both, of a parenthesis – as had been introduced twice in my text.
- A whole paragraph that wasn’t in the original had appeared, and a phrase that was there had disappeared.
- And finally, it seems that the greengrocer’s apostrophe is colonising the world: my finishings had been changed consistently to finishing’s.
All in all, it took more time (unpaid of course) to make the corrections and argue with the client than the translation job (a mere 467 words) had taken in the first place!
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