Lost in Translation

Last month I had a chance to revise a thai translation of three english texts, done by an outsource translation agency who eventually paid a freelance to do the job. It was, without any excuse, a totally botched job done by a self-proclaimed profesional translator. A real shame.

I don't mind people making mistakes in their jobs, we are human after all. The vital part is whether we've got guts to face our own blunders and embrace the comments for the better. If we made our own bed and wouldn't want to lie in it, who else would?

As far as the ethics concern, a translator should at least revise the final text before submitting it to his/her client. In this case, the translation came with tons of orthographic mistakes. Misspelling could be found in every single paragraph, not to mention the inadequate use of puntuation and mistranslation. I gave in after meticulously having corrected the first text, for it took too much time which I had better dedicate for something else more useful to the project.

The company returned the texts to the agency, who consequently passed our comments (made by me) to the translator. A few days later he sent us an email explaining about the gaffes. His excuses weren't in any way plausible. My translation is semantic not verbatim and therefore I didn't translate literally into thai (well, his translation was INDEED verbatim rather than semantic, in my opinion. I had no idea why he said that! And some cases, he even failed to translate certain words). As for a term such as Andrology which isn't yet officially coined in Thai, he opted for loan translation which doesn't make any sense at all, without putting any explanatory note anywhere.

The worst of it all was the catastrophic use of puntuation such as full stops, commas and semicolons. These marks are hardly used in Thai, only in some extremely rare cases, according to Thai standard, but each paragraph was full of them. The culprit justified his action by saying that, though fully aware of the said standard, he still used them because it was HIS standard and style! With this sentence, he didn't even deserve to be called a translator, and even less a Thai.

Until next time, I will keep praying that such species of irresponsible language professionals faced the extinction very soon so the circle would be left untainted.