 |
| Raining cats and dogs |
How do you want me to say it?
I have choices, but I cannot read your mind and I do not know your internal culture
Several years ago I
worked for some large international corporations and I had to produce legal
agreements to be used between the corporation and outside interests in laguages other than English. In one of these companies we drew up a list
of conventional intra company terms [sometimes referred to as "argot"] that would not be translated into the
language of the outside interest, but were to remain in the language defined by
the corporate culture of the company for which I was working. This was often the case with technical
acronyms. One of these was AQL (Aceptable
Quality Level). There were others in
engineering and in accounting and in purchasing as well.
The point I want to
make is that a good translator will try to identify what, if any of the terms
used in a legal, or even paralegal document are to be or not to be translated according
to accepted and established corporate culture.
The professional translator is aware of some of these idiosyncrasies and
inquires from the client which ones they are.
Verifying this from
the outset can prevent discomfort and discontent between the client and the
translator.
No comments:
Post a Comment