You Should Be More Forgiving of Translation Errors

This is from an English to English website


https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/49732175

Even the BBC could not spell Athletico with their star journalist in Ballague.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/49677343

 

No.

 

To me as long as the meaning is clear then I got no problem

 

as long it free i got no problem

 

typos are fine. but when you say translation errors i think terms and phrases being mistranslated which usually lose the original meaning which is not ok

 

No, please point out my mistakes. I'm still learning.

 

Forgiving doesnt mean ignoring mistakes.
Cheers!


PS I am trying to recruit subbers. Any thoughts/suggestions?

 

I don't have any, sorry...

 

Wait...as an editor wouldn’t my job be sacked if there were no errors???

...But I’m not even paid for it anyway so...

 

BBC does not take patreon money unlike translators. Their website runs on ads. Not to mention that news websites actually do fact check after it is posted and correct the articles or the fact that the rate of errors is insignificant compared to the mostly garbage , MTL level, half-assed translations that currently plague this community.

 

Sadly, you are right. Readers want speed above all. I have seen MTL websites requesting donations.
It happened to me with Common Sense of a Duke's Daughter

 

As someone who works for a legit translation company (unfortunately not as a translator since my skills don’t meet their requirements), I can say that mistakes make their way through even after several people have looked over the work.
A lot of the clients don’t care that much about spelling or grammar mistakes since the stuff they give us to translate is already riddled with errors. We’ll try to fix or leave a comment back to the client, but in the end, it’s up to them to fix it or not.
However, when it gets to documents that are thousands of pages long, ain’t no one got time to finely comb through the whole thing. Remember, there are deadlines to be met and as much as we would love to hand back a perfect product, many times we just don’t have the time or money to get someone to read through the whole thing. And don’t get me started on rush requests...

 

I once heard from my seniors in this field that translation requests by certain kind of companies dropped considerably after MTL (yes GT) got a little better. They used the excuse they only needed to get the gist of it to stop paying...

 

Not exactly - it's public-owned and primarily funded by the UK TV license. Ads are shown to non-UK users to supplement that a bit.

 

I'm always forgiving for translation typos and grammar errors. For me, I think that in the later chapters the skill of the translator would improve, and in some far future, they might look back and decide to fix the awful jarring errors they made in the past.

 

we'll have to wait for universe' heat death for that to happen in 99% of the cases.
cough*Talisman Emperor*cough
the early chapters are in that weird valley where it's not MTL english which you can just skim over and yet it's in a good enough level that you can't skim over and that's when the grammar start to bother you for real.

 

As long as they correct it, I think it's okay.

 

I agree with the OP. If I'm reading a translation, I'll note the quality of the translation but I'll always try to give them the benefit of the doubt. These are amateurs and they're bound to make mistakes or write phrases that don't scan very well. Usually the qualities of the original book will still shine through. The one place where I put down my foot is when the translator makes certain dumb style choices (like translating names). Instead of blaming translators, I think that it's much more worthwhile criticizing the original writer.

 

Lol a fellow TL just had to send me a link to this and give me a subtle roast.
TBH I'd only started TL-ing for a few months when I started TE. Sorry
Hope you think it's better now. XD

P.S. like GDLiZy said. It's a growth process, and yeah there probably will be a time when we go back and take a look at everything. Anyway you can always send PMs for things you think need to be fixed right away.

 

indeed it is a learning process. and i'd say you got good after the first couple 100 chapter, and as i said your translation wasn't that bad to begin with just need an editor at the time.
so please by all means keep up the good work