High-profile translation gone wrong: The BBC News website today carries the sorry tale of a road sign that carries an embarrassing mistake. Road signs in Wales are bilingual, in English and Welsh. And one local authority sent an email to their own in-house translation department, asking for a translation of the text on a road sign. What came back was an automated email, in Welsh, saying "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu" - or, if you prefer an English translation: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

Unfortunately, the official requesting the translation did not read Welsh, did not realise that this reply was not in fact a translation of their road sign.... and duly had the sign made. You can see the end result here - a road sign that bans trucks from using the road in English, and in Welsh says "I'm not here, send me an email". Oh dear!

The moral? Good communication is crucial when buying a translation, and that also means dealing with a translation company with project managers who have good communication skills.

If you are buying translations to go on signs, or for a full-page advert, or for box copy, then the potential for red faces if things go wrong is immense, and unlikely to be career-enhancing. Perhaps not the best time to be looking for a cheap quote?

And a footnote to this post:

Libby Purves comments on this Welsh translation issue in The Times, and she also addresses another of my favourite hobby-horses: automatic translation. Libby fed this English sentence into an online translation engine, then fed the Welsh through, and ended up with an English sentence that read: "I do entry because heartburn drum good vehicles. residential position except". Say what?!?!? The original English had been: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

Moral: If you have high-profile materials to be translated (by which I mean you are putting the text on a sign, using it in an advert in a magazine or newspaper, or having it client-facing in any way at all) then get it done by a professional, qualified, experienced translator.

Do good project managers make a difference? In the translation world, the answer is a definite "yes". As a translation company, project managers are our front line. They quantify our clients' work, they assess the resources that we need for each translation project - not just how many man-hours, but the most suitably qualified translators, the best software engineers, the tools that we will need to use on a project, the ideal copywriter for a particular text. At our translation company offices in Stockport, Greater Manchester, we employ highly qualified, highly experienced translation project managers.

A few weeks ago I participated in an Oasis webinar on using the XLIFF open standard as a mechanism for translating user documentation written using the DITA open standard. If you missed the main event, the XLIFF / DITA Webinar slides are now available for download.

A gentle moan about the state of the railways in Britain: In November, I'll be speaking at the Translator as Strategic Partner conference in London, which I am looking forward to. What I am not looking forward to is the logistical challenge of getting home again!

Getting there is simple. I can get on board one of Virgin Trains' lovely new Pendolino trains near my office in Stockport, and two hours later I will be in central London. Conference organiser Michael Benis has kindly arranged a hotel for me in London, and the conference promises to be a lot of fun, with over 250 delegates already booked.

But the way home..... oh dear!

Firstly, the West Coast Mainline is closed for repairs in Rugby. Again. So my journey home would involve a train, then a bus, then another train and if I am lucky, I would be home in around 4 to 5 hours. Hmmm, remember my two-hour journey on the way down? Maybe not!

So... plan B: My secret plan B involves catching a Midland Mainline train from London's lovely St Pancras station to Sheffield, and then the cross-country train to Manchester. Normally that works quite well. But on the weekend in question, that line also appears to be closed, this time for repairs at Derby. Trains replaced by buses. Oh dear.

I have written before on the sad state of Britain's railways. My grandfather was a train driver, back in the days of steam trains. I dread to think what he'd make of the current state of affairs! Still, on the bright side, there's always this useful international dictionary of useful phrases for rail travellers in Britain, which the translation company that I work for provided the translations for in Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch and Polish.

DITA and XLIFF are two important emerging technologies in the world of technical writing and translation. Last month, I took part in an OASIS webinar, explaining what translation companies look for with open standards like this, and how (if used correctly) they can enable LSV (or language service vendors) to offer cost savings to clients when translating their documents into multiple languages. If you missed the webinars, the two DITA / XLIFF webinars can now be downloaded from the Oasis web site.

I will also be participating in a live version of this presentation at the DITA Europe conference in the lovely German city of Munich on 17-18 November 2008, again explaining how clients can obtain cost savings across their multilingual documentation by using approproate XML workflows.

The season of conferences is upon us: I always enjoy the autumn round of technical conferences for translation professionals and for tech writers. Last year I was able to attend the highly enjoyable Online Help conference in Vilnius, and this year I am looking forward to several technical communication conferences:

Firstly, in November, I'll be taking part in a round table discussion on the future of translation memory, on the rise of Content Management Systems (CMS), and on the implications for translators, for translation companies and for the translation profession (and there are certainly implications for our profession, cascading right the way down to translator training both at universities and in the workplace). That will be at the Translator as Strategic Partner conference in London, England, on 22nd and 23rd November 2008. So far, there are over 260 delegates booked to attend The Translator as Strategic Partner, so it promises to be a lively conference. The organisers have obtained sponsorship from ProZ, from the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, and from the Chartered Institute of Linguists, which has certainly helped increase awareness of the conference!


The DITA Europe conference is also being held in November, but this time in Munich, Germany. I hope to be speaking at DITA Europe on the use of XLIFF as an intermediary format when translating documentation written in DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture - an open standard for technical manuals). DITA Europe is always a good conference, and attracts a wide range of high-calibre participants, from senior management to technical writers, with a few computer geeks thrown in for good measure. It promises to be a fun event.

Looking further ahead, the Society for Technical Communication (STC) have asked me to be Track Manager for the "Managing People, Projects and Business" track at the 2009 STC Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in May 2009. The Call for Papers is currently open for the 2009 STC Conference, and we are looking forward to putting together an exciting program.

Unfortunate foreign names, part 288 in an occasional series: Several kind readers have been in touch with more mishaps in translation, more foreign names that do not travel well. Some of them have been hilariously funny, but sadly not suited to a business web site.

Amongst those that do pass the "fit for publication" test, I have the following two linguistic gems:

In Barcelona, we have the "Colon Hotel". To quote their literature, "No other hotel may offer what Colon hotel does". Hmmmm. Most intestine... um, I mean, interesting! (As an aside, COLÓN is actually the Spanish for Christopher Columbus's surname).

And from Germany, one of our German translators kindly pointed me towards a company called Arsol Aromatics. I shall refrain from further comment!