Sunday, 22 April 2012

How to be an awful translator


A few rough guidelines:

1) Idiomatic expressions? Translate them literally. Isn’t that creative?
2) Editable graphics? Just pretend they were non-editable and skip them.
3) Names? Don’t google them. You wouldn’t mind if people misspelled yours, would you?
4) Don’t even bother to open background texts. Who has time for that, right?
5)  A PDF document as reference material? Doesn’t the ADOBE converter do the job perfectly?
6)  Don’t like the original font and layout? Use your own. The designer will appreciate your efforts.
7) Don’t re-read your translation when you’re done – the proofreader or client will be more than happy to correct all your typos and syntax errors.
8) Don’t use the spell checker. I’m sure you know how to write anyway.
9) Save your file in a different format. Let the proofreader or client figure it out.
10) And last but not least, deliver an hour late. Deadlines are overrated.

Thank you for a job well done!

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