Eight or so of us met up on Zoom on the evening of 13 May. This time we had a text to look at. This one was a marketing brochure about a specific piece of equipment used in manufacturing industrial vehicles. Although it had some technical terms for the parts, they were largely searchable, and the other translation issues were clear. Among the questions we agreed should be asked were who the intended audience was, and if the English translation was to be a source text for translation into other languages. There was also a discussion about whether the ‘lifting/raising’ metaphor (relevant to the type of machine) in the opening sentence was intentional or not, and if it should be translated as such to add a little humour or whether it was by now a tired old joke in that world.

This text was especially interesting because of what happened after the translator sent in the translation. This agency always asks the translator to take a final look at the revised text, as a final ‘pre-delivery check’. Good practice, we agreed, and something that should not take much time. The excitement at the SIG meeting came when we saw what the agency revisor had changed. The first paragraph was a sea of tracked changes. The revisor had changed an active (and attractive) marketing-style translation into a literal translation, full of passive constructions that had sucked the life out of it.

We agreed that a revisor’s job should not entail this much work in the first place (unless there are real mistakes, of course, but this translator knows the client company very well, and the revisor was perhaps a little wet behind the ears), and that in no way was the revised text ‘fit for purpose’. At that point we were all looking forward to what Brian Mossop would have to say about revising texts in his talk at the SENSE conference on 3-5 June.

The next meeting should be on 8 July. Check the Events page for details as the time approaches.