Ah, Friday! You can finally get some sleep tonight after the wild midweek celebration at the office. You all partied with your staff on Tuesday, right? (Pause. A sea of blank faces.) Tuesday was International Translation Day, so of course you recognized the indispensable talents, skills and hard work of your translators and interpreters. Right?

Here are five good reasons you should have:

1. Your translators keep your corporate materials from ending up in compilations of the funniest translation errors from around the globe. For example, there is the world-famous Squirrel Institute (Институт белка — Institute for the Study of Proteins; белок = protein; белка = squirrel). Or those wacky hotels where guests beg the staff: Please Remove My Number! Or: Please Clean Up My Number (просьба убрать номер — please clean my room; номер = hotel room). Not to mention the predictable menu offering of language in a test (язык в тесте = tongue fritters). Or the odd, but touching, expressions of concern for Russian-speaking guests: Напряжённо ожидайте ступеньку (“Caution! Stairs!” translated as “Stressfully Expect a Little Step”).

2. Your translators are used to the fact that everyone in the world, from the lowliest Ph.D. candidate to the president of the universe, will write or edit speeches until about 14 hours before they are going to present them, at which point they will e-mail them to the translator, who will stay up all night to do it only to get a batch of edits at 6 a.m. If translators were French airline workers, we’d be on strike every single day of the year. More.

See: The Moscow Times

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