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["Bill Geschwind" <geschwin AT email.unc.edu>]

> 
> > 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
> 

That was just one of many, many examples of the effect of cultural
issues on translation, and this one illustrates that particular point
very well. I don't think that the gender of the translators had nearly
as much to do with the problem in this case as the lack of guidelines
for the translators about to how to handle situations in which a simple
translation alone is not sufficient or appropriate, as well as
unrealistic and poorly stated expectations for the translators. What
would have helped would have been some consistent internal policies for
the translators to follow in these types of situations. Should they a)
bring the problem to the project manager's attention to contact the
client and ask them how to proceed, or b) use their own judgment to
adapt the text to the target market as they feel appropriate or c) just
blindly translate the given text. Choice c) is the one that I suspect
most of our translators would have chosen in this situation, since it
would let them escape blame when the client complains about a poor
translation ("..but I translated what was there. It's their fault since
they should have known better and given me better copy to translate...")
, however it is also the choice that does the client the least good,
since it leaves them with a document that cannot be used as is for the
intended purposes, but which can be defended as a translation of the
original text.