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.
Usage
An 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.
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.
Usage
An 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 Intuition
Anecdotally, 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 Analysis
Based on corpus analysis, we see that the singular "translation" is much more commonly used as an adjective than the plural "translations."
A. Authoritative Sources
How do authoritative sources use the terms in question?
I. Lexicographer's Intuition
Anecdotally, 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 Analysis
Based on corpus analysis, we see that the singular "translation" is much more commonly used as an adjective than the plural "translations."
A. Authoritative Sources
How do authoritative sources use the terms in question?
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 Usage
How does the world at large use the terms in question?
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.
Nouns
Although 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 Learned
Don'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:
3 comments:
This is sort of a tangent, related to your discussion on use of corpus (plural form?). Professor Miguel Jimenez-Crespo gave a great presentation at the recent ATA Conference in NY City, about using a monolingual corpus to determine what terms are actually used in a language's natural state, rather than using Google as a "full world" corpus. He gave various tips on how to locate "local" content (not translations), although that task may be a bit technical and take too much computing power for most of us. I think there is still great value on doing this in a small scale, manual way, to find content that is not translated so as to find the true word usage, not just something that becomes acceptable in translation because it is "understandable" but not native or natural. Of course, he was referring more to translations FROM English rather than INTO English.
And per your note at the end of this post, I would NEVER criticize your grammar/style (like you said, too busy, and who does not make errors on the Internet.... ;)
Best,
Eve Bodeux
www.speakingoftranslation.com
www.bodeuxinternational.com
Good comment, Eve. Thank you. Do you recall any of the tips shared by Professor Jimenez-Crespo?
Certainly one can at least limit a search to specific TLDs (Top Level Domains) such as .US, .EDU, .CO.UK, etc. All one needs to do is add "site:us" or similar to the search.
Thanks, Adam, for an original post that I found very interesting, and spot-on. One example you pointed out is something of a pet peeve of mine: translation versus interpreting. They are not interchangeable, folks! Thanks for including that. Perhaps I'll take this opportunity to include *that* issue in my next blog post.
In terms of Google searches, though, we all need be cognizant that while this tactic does uncover common usage, it doesn't always uncover the best or correct terms based on our context or our audience.
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