Footnote: "According to the text, the "Update Measurement" button is to be actuated at this point, but the shown screen does not have such a button."

In the discussion with the client it turned out that in the original manual a whole paragraph had been accidentally deleted.
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Making sense

We never just translate what the text says. We can only translate what we understand, meaning what is plausible within the respective technical discipline or domain. [more]

Sometimes an engineer has inadvertently phrased a sentence so that it says exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to mean. And if something does not make sense to us ...it may not make sense to others.

So we first validate the meaning and ask questions to clarify the matter. Once we know what the text was intended to say, we can translate it. If it is not possible to validate our interpretation with the author, we at least make a note and point out that this sentence could also have a completely different meaning.

Out clients are grateful for this approach of looking beyond the words. "You are our external quality assurance", as a project manager once said.

Admitted, this is not in full compliance with the EN 15038 for translation services. That standard requires the translator to refrain from any comment on the contents of the text and that the translation ideally should reflect the quality of the original.

But honestly: would that be in your best interests?

You certainly know the phenomenon of being blinded by routine. Five people have proofread a text and then an outsider comes and within five seconds spots a mistake that was not noticed by all the others. Let us face it: to err is human!

Standard or no standard – our clients simply need a translation that makes sense to them and their business partners. And that is exactly what we do: we make sense.

In the specifications of an emergency power system, the cubed sign "³" appeared at various places without making any sense. Asked about the meaning, the engineer who had commissioned the translation of the specifications merely stated that this signified a power and should simply be taken over. Yet this answer was of little help, since in this case the exponent had no basis, i.e. it was unclear what was "cubed". So we tried ourselves to find a possible solution and discovered that the cubed sign if formatted in the Symbol font appears as "≥", and that indeed would make sense. The client was rather grateful for our insistence and changed the text accordingly.

...

In a draft contract, reference was made to documents purportedly issued by the International Chamber of Commerce. For us it is standard procedure to check the original source wherever possible so that we can quote correctly. However, in this case, our research showed that these ICC documents did not exist. The related passages were simply copied without any verification from a "sample agreement" that was available at a number of sources on the Internet but was nonetheless false. In fact, it turned out that the ICC had issued an official warning against the false use of so-called ICC regulations. We pointed out the matter to our client and recommended having the potential legal consequences investigated by his lawyer.

...

In the description of a building, we found contradicting statements on the number of entrances, once four and once six. Although this may be only of minor importance, only one of these statements can be true. We used Google Street View to get an idea of what the building ensemble looked like, and in the following discussion with our client, it was possible to clarify the inconsistency and correct the error.

Many people think that we as translators must first and foremost know the foreign language and that we just pick the words out of the dictionary and put them in the correct grammatical order. If only it were that simple...

Certainly, a good translation requires appropriate language skills but what is needed most is expertise, good research capabilities and the ability to familiarize oneself quickly with the matter at hand.

Without a good general and technical knowledge, we might not even know what the original text is all about – after all, many of the texts we translate would not mean much to an ordinary native speaker, as the following examples may perhaps illustrate:

Upon the occurrence of a Disinvestment Event (as defined in Appendix B) the Target Allocation to Portfolio Units shall be set to zero and the value of the Index on the Valuation Date shall be determined by the Determination Agent in its sole discretion provided that the Redemption Amount shall not be less than the Protected Amount and shall be paid on the Maturity Date.

The tgAAG76 vector is a recombinant adeno-associated virus vector of serotype 2. The vector contains the human RPE65 coding sequence driven by a 1400-bp fragment of the human RPE65 promoter and terminated by the bovine growth hormone polyadenylation site, as described elsewhere.

While there are certain fields in which we can draw on the expert knowledge we have acquired over the years, every job requires a lot of research. Our library is full of technical literature, yet with the rapid progress of technology, many reference books and dictionaries are already dated at the time of publishing. Today, most research is conducted over the Internet. The Internet provides information about virtually everything but you must be able to search correctly and above all to judge the results with a critical eye. Quite often a closer look at the results displayed by one of the search engines reveals that the various findings can all be traced back to one and the same source and that this first source is wrong.

Of course it would be preposterous to claim that we understand as much of the matter as the expert who wrote the original text. But we must understand enough of the subject to identify and describe errors or inaccuracies contained in the text – and many texts contain minor or major mistakes. So translating is also a matter of ongoing training – every text brings something new and adds to our general knowledge, expertise or ability to research.

In actual practice, this means that we must be able, for instance, to point out to an engineer that he or she has inadvertently used a wrong unit of measurement (because we happen to know that a certain physical quantity is measured in this unit and not that). Or when translating a contract, we may perhaps have to ask the lawyer who drafted it whether it is really intended that a certain contractual duty is to be assumed by the seller (because we know from experience that this duty is usually assumed by the buyer). It happens quite often that "buyer" and "seller" are confused in the wording of contracts.

Once we know what the original text is intended to say, we must ensure that we use the correct technical terms.

In most cases, the dictionaries will suggest several translations of a word. Let us take a simple example: In German/English dictionaries you will find the following English words for the German entry "Schirm": umbrella, screen, shield, visor, chute, cap, guard und shade.

umbrella to describe a device protecting against the rain
screen to describe a more or less planar device that protects or hides something or to identify a video display terminal
shield to describe a device or method that protects something, also in military applications
visor to describe a device protecting the face against injury
chute as the short form of parachute (incidentally chute also describes an inclined channel)
cap to describe the top of a mushroom or
shade to describe the upper part of a lamp that reflects the rays or conceals the bulb from view

We must know when to use which word, mistakes could be dangerous. Just imagine an instruction asking you to "grab the cap" (instead of the "chute") when you need to jump out of a burning airplane...

Whenever possible, we should also check whether or not the technical terms used in the text are defined by an official standard such as ISO or EN and if so, find their equivalent in the target language. Then there are certain company-specific terms which nobody else uses (in modern parlance: zero Google hits). In these situations, we must use all our investigative skills to find out what is meant and then find – or sometimes even create – a corresponding term or phrase in the target language.

It must also be ascertained whether a word is part of a proper name and as such must not be translated. This may apply especially to geographical references in names of companies or associations. Is the "British Raw Opium Composting Society" the proper name or is "British" used here only to distinguish it from similar societies in other countries?

Then there are other snares to be avoided, such as the 'false friends': sometimes you believe you know the English equivalent of a German expression only to be humbled by the discovery that in the case at hand, the German "hohe See" is not equivalent to "high seas" but to "deep sea".

All of this must be found out, verified, and validated before or during the translation. We also must ensure that the final wording is in line with the intentions of our client, with the desired positioning vis-à-vis its competitors, with the range of products offered and their special features.

And finally, our customers usually expect us to enter the translation in an existing file and retain the formatting. Sometimes this means that we have to use text boxes of a size of 3 mm x 5 mm and a very, very small font to accommodate the text in the available space. We need to be creative and familiar with the options of our word processors to master this task which of course takes much longer than simply typing a text in a line.

So there is quite an effort behind every single translation. We look beyond the word, we think along the client's lines, we check and we ask whenever necessary. There have been situations in which we pointed out 40 mistakes, contradictions and inconsistencies within one text – and later learned that colleagues translating the same text into other languages did not raise a single issue and just translated what the text said. Our clients have not only become accustomed to our questions, they even rely on us to ask. One of our clients even discontinued working with a certain translator because he did not ask any questions. Someone who does not have a single question, was our client's reasoning, probably does not even bother to understand the text.