| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3] | "Professional human translators" or crowdsourcing gone bad? Thread poster: Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT
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| "Soy traductor" not "soy un traductor" | Mar 30, 2016 |
Inga Petkelyte wrote: Gabriele Demuth wrote:
This term alone usually puts me off applying to an agency, it sounds unprofessional and wrong. I, on contrary, would give more value to such an agency as it is clear from the beginning they don't give machine crap to their clients and thus, they don't demand it from their suppliers. Tomás, what is wrong in this: "Si eres un traductor, por favor.." How should it be? I understand written Spanish perfectly but am a beginner in its grammar, so was wondering how this should be put in a correct way.
In English "I am a student"
In Spanish "Soy estudiente" "Soy un estudiante" would mean something like "I'm a kind of student". We do not use indefinite article with professions in Spanish.
| | | | | "Sólo", "guión" | Mar 30, 2016 |
Robert Forstag wrote: Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote: Inga Petkelyte wrote:
Tomás, what is wrong in this:
"Si eres un traductor, por favor.." How should it be? Good question. Gramatically "traductor" is an abbreviated nominal group, or "grupo nominal escueto" in Spanish. Basically, if the reality designated by the word is contrued as an indeterminate/unnumbered type or class, the determiner is suppressed. Some more examples are: - "No tiene monedas." (as opposed to "*No tiene unos/algunos monedas") - "Son artistas." ("*Son unos/algunos artistas"; "Son unos artistas" would be correct, but the meaning would be completely different: you would convey that some people who are not professional artists show the qualities of artists in some respect.) - "Se pasa el día leyendo novelas" ("*Se pasa el día leyendo unas/algunas novelas") You can read in detail about this in article 15.6 "La ausencia del artículo: los grupos nominales sin determinante" in the Nueva gramática de la lengua española, Manual by the Association of Spanish Language Academies (ISBN 9788467032819), a very good resource any Spanish professional translator should always have at hand. Using "un traductor" in a supposedly professional translation is pretty bad. It would be the rough equivalent of something like, "she gave him some advices" in an into-English translation. The kind of thing that makes one wince. If nothing else, it would be expected for such a glaring error to have been noticed and corrected in the proofreading process. As for "sólo" vs. "solo", or "guión" vs. "guion," it seems that there are a lot of educated native Spanish speakers that still use the older and now officially disapproved forms. So I would not necessarily categorize such usage as "atrocious." Still, the kinds of errors Tomás cites here places such material outside of the realm of what can reasonably be considered a "professional" translation. [Edited at 2016-03-17 15:09 GMT]
"Sólo" is discouraged, but not banned.
"Guión" and similar words are no longer allowed.
We may like it or not, but that's the rule.
| | | | | EU institutions | Mar 30, 2016 |
Tomás Cano Binder, CT wrote: Samuel Murray wrote:
Do all Spanish newspapers etc use the same spelling rules?
Do all Spanish translators know all the new rules, and do they really all use these rules? Or do some of them fly by the seat of their pants, and keep writing the way they wrote in school? Yes, I think newspapers and professional proofreaders all use the new rules. As for translators, I like to think that all of them know the new rules or have shown some interest in them. To me, this is very much a question of what makes us resist to change, even when it is clearly justified and explained. Is it really that we feel that the old rules are more correct, or is it that we want to avoid the effort of adapting? I found it very hard indeed to get rid of the accent in "solo." It took me many months, and I even had to punish myself for every violation by putting a euro in a jar, etc. Now I am happy I "turned" when it comes to spelling. Not only do I comply with widely accepted rules agreed by all Spanish-language academies, but also save the effort of adding the accent...  It would be interesting to know how many translators still use "sólo" and their age. I fall more on the oldie group, and suspect that the younger generation find it easier to adapt to the new rules.
They still resist. I know it from my own experience having spent some time working with them. For example, they still separate thousands with a dot as opposed to a space (20.000 vs. 20 000). Well, we all know, dots are banned from numbers as of 2010. They do not care. They do not use space in percentages either (30% vs. 30 %). Good for them, but that does not change the rule. I do like having rules. It adds objectivity.
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