flotsam and jetsam: Archive

Dec 29th

Dec 20th

Dec 16th

Dec 15th

Dec 13th

10 notes

Dec 13th

8 notes

Dec 12th

254 notes

Fellow PL->EN translators, what do you do with the ubiquitous “honorowy patronat?” Honorary patronage just sounds wrong, and appears to be a phenomenon reserved mainly to non-English speaking countries. Years of PBS have conditioned me to go with “Made possible by support from the XYZ Famousname Foundation,” but I subconsciously fear that clients will protest the suggestion of there being any...

Dec 12th

Dec 11th

I guess I’m rather relieved that whoever is responsible for the event called “Wielkie Organy w Katedrze” hasn’t attempted to come up with their own English translation.

Dec 11th

2 notes

Disasters in Translation, part 27: →

Amen, both of you! Someone should make an app that automatically checks a translated text, and if 90% of it matches Google Translate’s version, they’re fired. And shot. Actually, the reason I’m doing this job in the first place is because I initially refused to proofread what the previous translator came up with. I gave in after they fired her and gave the rest to me.

Dec 10th

7 notes

Disasters in Translation, part 27: →

I’m translating a calendar of cultural events for a certain .gov.pl institution. Hundreds of short descriptions, hundreds of festival names, and everything has to be looked up. So I’ve been seeing a lot of Polish websites translated into English over the course of the past week, and in terms of the event-prestige-to-quality-of-translation ratio, this website really takes the cake. I think...

Dec 10th

7 notes

Dec 10th

384 notes

Dec 10th

188 notes

Dec 8th

1 tag

“One of the most popular and with the most numerous audience jazz festivals in...”

Dec 5th

1 tag

“Due to the jubilee of the festival, the Organisers expect an extraordinary large...”

– This is the LAST time I take a proofreading job where I have to follow along in the Polish just to understand what the hell the “translator” had in mind.

Dec 5th

2 notes