The World Fishing Exhibition took place in Vigo a couple of weeks ago. To celebrate the event, the Xornal de Galicia took the step of publishing some English translations of the World Fishing content within its pages.
The editorial headline “Fishing the future” sounded strange to the English ear, basically lacking a preposition as well as a capital letter. In other words, “Fishing for the Future” would have sounded much better. Sadly, the articles in English got worse as I read on. I don’t know whether the translations were done by non-natives, translation tools or English speakers with little experience of translation.
In any case, it would appear that the Xornal had fallen into the common trap of presenting English for marketing purposes while hoping that the poor quality of the translations would not be noticed. Many native speakers will pick up on this, as well as others proficient in the given language.
The translation business is no different from any other in that if you take the cheap option, you are likely to end up with a sub-standard product. Incidentally, I am not the type who spends a lot of time complaining about bad translations, let’s face it they are everywhere so it would be very time consuming. But I expected better from the Xornal of Galicia as it is a newspaper which normally takes the topic of language very seriously.
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