Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Disastrous

As a surprise for my cast and the scriptwriter for my current short film, "Nine Sisters," I thought I'd dub the film into Spanish.  I really wanted to work with Chinese or Russian, but I would have no way of evaluating quality.  Since I'm a professional translator, I would be embarrassed if the end-result were absolute crap, so I went with Spanish.

Where was I going to find a translator?  Not the American Translators Association directory, where I could find hundreds of, lovely, qualified, certified translators.  No.  I'd need a budget for that.  So I turned to Fiverr, where people will do the damnedest things for $5.  I found a translator! A native Spanish speaker, someone who worked in an industry requiring precision and who had studied translation, linguistics, and education.  Sounded like a winner to me!  

And then . . .



Que desastre! What a disaster! He didn't read my instructions, so instead of looking at the script I sent him, he listened to the video (in English) and typed in Spanish. I've done hours and hours of this sort of transcription/translation, but no way did I produce the sort of crap he gave me. Very little punctuation, sentences that went on for paragraphs, and he didn't even run a spellchecker. These are very important things in professional translation. And then there were outright meaning errors. The other things can be fixed and perhaps even forgiven, but meaning errors AND all those other things . . .

English: Uhm, I don't know. Maybe a rethink is in order. 
His translation (in Spanish): I don't know. My thoughts aren't in order. 

*facepalm* I know, I know: you get what you pay for, but the other things I'd ordered on Fiverr had been spectacularly good. Ah well. Next time I'll tell you about the voice-over actors.

No comments:

Post a Comment