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[David Minton <dminton AT mindspring.com>]

On 3/26/02 9:00 AM, "Bill Geschwind" <geschwin AT email.unc.edu> wrote:

> As mentioned above, taking cultural issues into account is very
> important in internationalizing a project, and not only with regard to
> material that may be offensive in another culture (like those Page 3
> girls). For example, I once had a project which included not only the
> software strings and the manual, but also some of the marketing
> materials, which were full of baseball metaphors (Using this product you
> will score a Home Run every time!). In this example it was not taken
> into consideration that baseball is not as popular around the world as
> it is here in the US, or that it is even known in every country or
> culture. For this to work in German, I had to replace the baseball
> metaphors with soccer metaphors, however some translators would argue
> that this is an adaptation and no longer a translation and making these
> kinds of decisions is not the job of a translator.

I think I remember that project. Forget about the target market, I don't
think some of the translators understood all of the sports metaphors.
Without trying to sound sexist, I'm not sure if they had problems because it
was an American sport, or because some of the female translators were not as
sports savvy period. It was quite a sticky wicket.

David