I'm surprised not to find me in the list! I was told that I got the second position?

Flaws in a top-ranking text of the last English-German translation contest

One of the top-ranked texts at last English/German translation contains without any doubt some well done turns, as the infinitivization “Du wollen Bild ..”, very popular in German to mimic the way of speaking of foreigners. But I have been surprised by several mistakes.

1. Translation faults:
o "Völker ganzer Länder" is not the correct translation for "populations of whole countries", as it means "the people (in the sense of nations/tribes) of whole countries"; correct is "die Bevölkerung/Bewohner ganzer Länder"
o "in jedem Laden verkäuflich" does not translate "on sale at every shop", but means "sellable at every shop"; the precise translation is "in jedem Laden käuflich/erhältlich/erwerbbar (for tourists it is not relevant what can be sold, but what can be bought)
o "im Bilde sein" for "to be in the picture" is wrong, because it means "to be informed"; the correct translation is "auf dem Bild sein".
2. Incorrect inflectional case / verb:
o "reproduziere es auf meine … Wohnzimmerwand" (accusative) in lieu of "reproduziere es auf meiner … Wohnzimmerwand" (dative) or even better "projiziere es auf meine …Wohnzimmerwand"
o “ich schrumpfe es" is a wrong transposition of the transitive form of the English verb "to shrink"; the accurate form in German is "ich lasse es schrumpfen" or "ich verkleinere es"; „schrumpfen“ has no transitive form in German.
3 Orthographic errors:
o "Instamatik" is an improper Germanization of a product name "Instamatic" of Kodak.
o "irgend etwas" is a misspelling of the indefinite pronoun "irgendetwas"
o "alles mögliche" is a misspelling of "alles Mögliche" (New German orthography)

Additionally there are some stylistic flaws (even if they are not errors):
o "durch Fotografen zur Seite geschoben" instead of "von Fotografen zur Seite geschoben..“
o "betrachten sich als kannibalisiert" for "seeing themselves cannibalized" instead of "sehen sich …" or "halten/fühlen sich …" sounds better.
o “weil sich meine Frau daran lehnt..” instead of “weil sich meine Frau daran anlehnt”
o “Tante Emma zuhause Postkarten … zu schicken..” instead of “Tante Emma Postkarten nach Hause zu schicken…”

For such a high demanding contest of professional translators, I recommend to recur in future to professional lectors/editors/philologists of a target language country. For German an option could be the hotline service of the Duden: http://www.duden.de/deutsche_sprache/sprachberatung/index.php.

Regards,
Vittorio Ferretti