How can a company trust its language service provider to use the most appropriate industry terminology for finance, technology, law, health care, or any other industry when that service provider does not even use the most appropriate terminology for the translation industry? There are many subjective ways to evaluate a translation company's expertise in various industries. However, one way to tell that the service provider is not very particular about using appropriate terminology for any industry is to see that it butchers the terminology of the translation industry - the industry it should know best of all!
An example described below shows why a translation company may not be very professional if it defies common usage and employs the term "translations" as an adjective. This offense is not as grievous as confusing the terms "translation" and "interpretation" or as atrocious as saying "
interpretate" and "interpretator," but it is still a significant error.
Why should anyone care? Many companies have complained about bad translations by indicating, "The translated words were not technically wrong. The definition of each word was right; however, it just didn't sound natural and correct to someone in our industry." Good translation is not 'word for word,' but 'meaning for meaning.' Furthermore, a really good translation evokes the same audience reaction intended by the original text, as if it had originally been written in the translated language.
UsageAn important part of evoking the appropriate reaction and thus producing good writing and good translation involves choosing the correct words not only according to their definitions but also according to common
usage.
Usage: the ways and contexts in which spoken and written words are used, determined by a lexicographer's intuition or from corpus analysis.
Based on Common Usage, the Correct Adjective is "Translation," not "Translations"When used as an
adjective, the singular "translation," not the plural "translations," is the correct word choice. It is correct to say "translation service," "translation projects," or "translation department," but NOT "translations service," "translations projects," or "translations department." There are a number of ways to tell that this is the correct usage.
I. Lexicographer's IntuitionAnecdotally, I find that only non-native English speakers and people lacking experience in the translation industry ever use the incorrect plural "translations" as an adjective. I'm not claiming to be a professional terminologist or to have a degree in lexicography; however, lexicography is a skill that is necessarily adopted to some degree by all translation professionals. Most of my colleagues agree with me that the singular "translation" is more appropriate as an adjective than the plural "translations."
II. Corpus AnalysisBased on corpus analysis, we see that the singular "translation" is much more commonly used as an adjective than the plural "translations."
A. Authoritative SourcesHow do authoritative sources use the terms in question?
Using Google, search the
MultiLingual Magazine website for "translation service" and "translations service" (or comparable terms) and you'll see an obvious difference in results. [site:multilingual.com "translation service']returns 166 results and [site:multilingual.com "translations service"] returns only one result, which turns out to be an error.
Using Google, search the
Monterey Institute of International Studies website for "translation project" and "translations project" to come to a similar conclusion. [site:miis.edu "translation project"] returns 22 results and [site:miis.edu "translations project"] returns zero results.
B. The Internet via Google: a Large Corpus to Analyze Common UsageHow does the world at large use the terms in question?
Google makes it very easy to determine relative frequency of use when searching for a term or phrase to assess appropriate usage.
Googlefight is another tool that can make such assessments more efficient by comparing result volumes for two searches side by side. For example, the following image compares the results obtained when searching Google for "translation services" versus "translations services."
The following table summarizes additional results using Googlefight to compare the frequency with which online authors use the adjective "translation" versus the adjective "translations."
These results show that, depending on the exact phrase, the singular form of "translation" is 7 to 100 times more common.
NounsAlthough it appears that the singular form of the noun is also more common than the plural form of the, the above data regarding usage of adjectives does not indicate that it is wrong to refer to "translations" as a noun. My personal preference is to use the terms "translated files," "translated documents," or "translation projects," but it appears that this personal usage preference is more open for debate. Often, the plural form may actually sound better as part of a company name.
Lessons LearnedDon't worry about it if your language service provider refers to the noun "translations" in their company name or in conversation.
Don't worry about it if a non-native English speaker at you language service provider uses "translations" as an adjective.
However, if your native English speaking language service provider introduces you to one of their "translations managers" in their "translations department" to help you with your "translations project," I recommend you run away!!! Run away fast and find a new translation company!!! This service provider either does not have much experience or they don't really care about using industry-appropriate terminology.
What do you think? Do you have arguments or evidence to the contrary? ...maybe something written in a usage dictionary... Or do you have similar examples of translation companies being betrayed by their own words? If so, please share them in the comments below.
Final note:
Yes, I know that I'm inviting a lot of bored people to point out every grammatical error and typo ever to appear on this blog. Oh, well.
Related posts:
The idea of "simultaneous interpretation goggles" has been around for a few years. Now NEC is taking it a step further by introducing the Tele Scouter, which can combine with voice recognition and machine translation and then instantly project translations directly onto a user's retina. Yes, onto the retina, not the lenses, thus adding a clever feature to augmented reality.
You'll probably agree that "they have a bit of the sense of the Borg from Star Trek," as Don DePalma observed in this BBC audio interview.
