Many moons ago when my husband was an editor
at a publishing house he was correcting the galley proofs for the German translation
of "Milagro". There was a sentence that he did not understand, "ehrliche,
gottverlassene Bohnen". This translates literally as "honest, from God
forsaken, beans", which makes utterly no sense at all. We got the English
version and were trying to find what the original was, when it dawned on me: this
was "honest-to-God beans", "waschechte Bohnen". Why on earth
don't translators ask when they don't understand something and don't find it in
their dictionary?
I once purchased the German translation of "Modern
Structured Analysis" by Tom DeMarco. I was planning on using it as a class
text, because German students hate reading English. But the first few pages were
unintelligible - and I rather though that I understood both Structured Analysis
and German. I started underlining the translation errors in yellow, and when I
got to the point where he was talking about an example that used "Dosenkunst"
(literally art-in-a-can) and I realized that this was supposed to be the translation
for "canned art", vorgefertigte Zeichungen, I wrote a nasty letter to
the publishers asking them if they didn't think it would be a good idea to pay
a translator who knew something about what he or she was translating. I never
got an answer on that, and I never used the book in class.
Ilse Schmiedecke
and I spent quite some time the other day trying to understand a mysterious error
message that JBuilder was giving a student. Neither one of us had seen it before.
It was the German version of JBuilder 8, and it was telling us that something
was "abgelehnt", rejected. We could not decide what it meant with "rejected".
But as veterans of many an error searching session, we felt that it must be a
classpath error (most of the student errors in Java seem to be classpath errors....).
The student experiemented with all sorts of things, and eventually, we found the
magic spot for the images files, and all was well. Ilse was curious to know what
"abgelehnt" meant, so she copied the entire code mess from the student
and provoked the error on an English version of JBuilder - "deprecated"
is what the compiler error was trying to say, just a warning that we were trying
to use something that will not be supported in future versions of Java. "Wird
in Zukunft nicht unterstützt" was what the translator should have been
writing. Moral: always use the English version
of software tools!