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MPs cannot read 'badly translated' EU papers
Published: 12 Jun 12 11:02 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20120612-43099.html
The lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag, sending dozens of European Union documents back to Brussels, slowing down crucial political work, because MPs can't make any sense of the translations.
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Some EU documents are now seen as a "consultation obstacle" – and this at a time when parliamentarians across Europe are fighting to tackle Europe's debt crisis.
The flawed translations have apparently slowed the work of the interior, finance, budgetary, economic, and defence committees in the German parliament. The paper also says that German versions of the documents are sometimes missing altogether.
The problem has apparently been a long-term one. Gunther Krichbaum, chairman of the Bundestag's Europe committee, told the paper that the European Commission had been promising a new "translation strategy" for a long time, "but nothing has happened."
Stefan Ruppert, domestic policy spokesman for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), added, "There are just more and more of [the bad translations]."
Bundestag MPs are to discuss the problem on Thursday, and are expected to recommend that the government demand that the EU Commission allocate sufficient resources to make better translations.
The European Union currently works in 23 languages, with thousands of officials devoted to translating documents - at a cost of several hundred million euros a year.
The Local/bk
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Your comments about this article:
"The EU institutions spent around €1 billion on translation and interpreting in 2007, representing around 1% of the EU budget or €2.50 per citizen. This figure would continue to rise by 5% annually."
h**p://www.euractiv.com/culture/eu-translation-policy-stay/article-170516
If a translation is bad, it's because the source document was worse.
You should see the turdish c*ap that lands on translators' desks. Sentences with no verbs or sentences basically written by "authors" with a very poor grasp of their own language. And often customers don't want to be bothered in the case of questions, so you have to go it alone and "guess" (nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen) what the customer may have meant.
I work for a few companies (freelance) where I am the go-to guy when customers complain about a translation they have received from other translators. And from the many such cases I have gone through I can confirm that it's almost always the customer's fault. They hand in cr*p with stupid deadlines and expect masterpieces to come out at the other end. And yet ironically, when it comes to customer complaints, I reckon most of the translations returned were in fact of a way higher quality that the poor quality submitted for translation in the first place.
Just my two cents worth......
I'm also Translator/Interpreter and Proofreader as well, working for few agencies and my client never return some documents like " bad translation ". In this job no place for mistakes or something similar.
- Too much hassle, they want a whole load of references and documentation. I don't have that much time to burn.
- They usually want bidders to cover several languages, which effectively excludes sole freelance translators.
- The price is not generous even if you get the contract as a direct provider. If you get it through an agency which takes its own cut first, you're on the breadline.
- It is reported on the grapevine that a number of agencies enter bids and ask for CVs and references from high quality freelancers to bolster their bid, but when the jobs come in they actually give the jobs to cheaper translators.
reply by Boss jeans