Monday, May 04, 2009

The Headaches of conversions, virgules and ellipsis

"..my purpose here is to assure my colleagues, who will forever be accused of treason, that English is like any other language: a language in constant change, whose users will do what they please, stylebooks and scolding editors notwithstanding. Translators of non-fiction documents, if lucky, will have access to people who will be able to clarify texts that have hard to crack nuts in them.." - Anne Jones, legal and technical translator

If you do technical translations, then you should read the Ever-Changing English: A Translator’s Headache by Anne. Just to whet your appetite, here are a few gems:

(1) “If there is no data, NA it.” As it turned out, the idea was for the person to write NA (N/A or Not Applicable) in the space provided for writing the data. (This is an example of "verbing")

(2) "place on a table and/or rack.” Here the issue is really of a physical impossibility: you cannot place the same object on a table and a rack at the same time. (An example of a nonsensical virgule)

(3) A “temperature EN” was explained to me as a device with an Equipment Number that is used to measure temperature. And the engineer triumphantly informed me that “temperature is not a noun!” (elliptic ellipsis enough to make you want to give up translating and go on dole!)

Do read it. Long as it is, it is very entertaining (and elliptically useful).

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