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Meten is weten!

English translation: The numbers tell the tale

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GLOSSARY ENTRY (DERIVED FROM QUESTION BELOW)

Dutch term or phrase:	Meten is weten!
English translation:	The numbers tell the tale
Entered by:	Ken Cox

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12:03 Mar 20, 2005

Dutch to English translations [PRO]
Linguistics

Dutch term or phrase: Meten is weten!

This is about a software package for measuring traffic on a website. Of course it is easy to translate **meten is weten**, but I can't think of a similar catchy way to phrase it English as it is in the original Dutch.

Any good suggestions?

Johan Venter KudoZ activity Questions: 144 (1 open) (2 without valid answers) (8 closed without grading) Answers: 421
Local time: 06:38

The numbers tell the tale

Explanation:
The following is all IMHO.

In advertising and promotional texts the whole point is to sell the product, and in translations of such texts, exact translation of the original text is (generally speaking) less important than the sales impact. After all, the original text was chosen with this objective, and its literal or objective meaning is of secondary importance (unlike technical or legal texts, for example).

'Exact' (and in particular literal) translations of sayings and maxims used as headings or eyecatchers in promotional texts often fail to have the same impact in the target language, and in many cases they come across as forced or strange -- the last thing you want in a promotional text.
The best you can hope to do is to think of something that has a similar relationship to the general content or subject of the text and catches the reader's attention. And if you do manage this, you might ponder why you're working for translater's rates when you could be asking copywriter rates...

Selected response from:

Ken Cox
Local time: 06:38

Grading comment

This was what I was looking for. Very well put, thank you very much.
4 KudoZ points were awarded for this answer