« German pronunciation | Main | Prescriptive pedantry »

10/09/2010

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Barrie

Such things add to the gaiety of nations.

Candide

For similarity of shape, piña means hand grenade in Spanish military jargon.

Laura

Nice post! Google Translate might be helpful in some contexts, but definitely not to translate texts that are going to be published without being revised before. This kind of misfortunes also happen when the translation is given to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London instead of hiring a professional translation... I really don't know if it's a matter of ignorance or meanness...
Btw, "chiparrones" should be "chipirones" :)

Traductor Jurado

There is certain resemblance between "tocino de cielo":
http://lacocinadebender.com/tocino-de-cielo/postres-pasteleria
and "tocino":
http://www.gastronomiavasca.net/recipes/picture?recipe_id=1329

Hence the Spanish name.

Peter Harvey

Laura,

Thank you. I agree that Google can have its place, for example in getting an idea of what a newspaper article or letter says, but it should never be used for anything for presentation. I am a translator myself (among other things) and I have translated a few menus in my time. They are not easy, but with machine translation there is the added point that the software doesn't 'know' that it is dealing with a menu. And it goes without saying that all translation should be done by someone with an expert knowledge of the target language. I think it's ignorance and meanness (menus, while often difficult, are short and cheap to translate) but also just not caring. Another problem is that even if the translation is done properly, the client will want to make changes later on and does so himself instead of going back to the translator. I had a problem recently with a very respectable and serious medical organisation that changed a web site after I had translated it. Mistakes were introduced that would have reflected on my competence if I hadn't spotted them and insisted that my work must not be changed in any way.

Thanks too for the correction, which I have incorporated. Maybe I was getting mixed up with camarones (that bit came from menu, no photo), but the nomenclature of seafood is a minefield in which my knowledge is imperfect.

Peter Harvey

TJ,

Now that you mention it, there is a similarity in appearance. I'm not much of a dessert person* and tocino de cielo is something I avoid.

*Or a tocino person, come to that.

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