Yesterday, in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Fiesta del Chivo, I came across a word I didn’t know. It was: miríada.
For my sins, I am accustomed to skipping over words that I don’t recognise, particularly in a long book like this one. My Spanish is of a sufficiently competent level to be able to read around most lacunae, which will typically be a bit of vocabulary I don’t know (facial expressions; flora, fauna and food; latinamericanisms; recondite literary flourishes, etc.) without losing the thread or the sense of the sentence.
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The fire protection and security industry is now Quicksilver’s strongest area of specialisation. This is largely due to our President’s experience of more than 30 years in international management positions in this industry. As Tyco International’s former Global Director of Marketing and Communications, Colin has unmatched, first-hand experience of the issues and challenges of producing and maintaining multilingual documentation.
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An important aspect of ensuring that the finished translation is of an absolutely optimum standard is what are sometimes called the ‘quality control’ stages of the translation process.
Good LSPs generally have two or more stages of what is known (possibly misleadingly) as ‘quality control’.
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A translator’s lot is not an easy one. Possibly because they seem to work in a field in which all human beings are (or consider themselves) de facto experts, namely communication, there is certain tendency to see translators as drones, harmless drudges who do work which everyone else would be perfectly capable of doing were they a bit less busy. When companies outsource projects to an LSP, it is very common to hear comments like ‘I would do it myself but I don’t have time.’
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Frustration with a translation happens most often when the final client (the person who actually uses the translated material) has not been in direct contact with the translator himself. Not knowing who carried out the translation creates a subconscious lack of trust and a negative predisposition to the translated documentation. Moreover, a translation which is perceived by the user as ‘sub-optimal’ creates a high degree of frustration and irritation, and we often exaggerate how bad it really is. A few mistakes/discrepancies/preferences can lead to a reaction which is out of all proportion.
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