The Salt Lake Tribune’s Everyday Ethics section asks: Was dad right to translate diary?

My father, a translator, was hired by a man who suspected that his wife was unfaithful and married him only to get a green card. He had my father translate photocopied pages from her diary. Family members think this was unethical. My father maintains he simply did his job. You? (Incidentally, the diary confirmed the devastated man’s suspicions, and he is initiating divorce proceedings.)

The answer given is that the translator should have declined the job on moral grounds, instead of violating the privacy of the diarist. This is seen as parallel to the rule in the code of ethics of the American Translators Association that a translator should ‘refuse any assignment he believes to be intended for illegal or dishonest purposes, or against the public interest’ – this isn’t quite the same thing – translation may be legal, but not ethical.

One thing that strikes me is that the translator shouldn’t have been discussing his work with his family anyway.

The British Corner Shop newsletter thinks it’s time to advertise Easter eggs. Don’t they realize about Fasching coming first for the retailer?

*Easter Eggs Now Available
*Our Easter stock has arrived and is now on the British Corner Shop website. We have a fantastic range to choose from. There are teenage Easter eggs such as Mars, Revels, Kit Kat and Yorkie, Easter eggs for younger children such as
Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and Mini Eggs, Mars, Smarties, Maltesers and Milky Way
Magic Stars.
We also have a great range of traditional adult Easter eggs such as Ferrero
Rocher, After Eights, Quality Street and luxury Cadbury Flake Collection and
Cadbury Collection Delight Easter eggs as well as Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel and Cadbury Dairy Milk Easter eggs.

‘Traditional adult Easter eggs’ – Ferrero Rocher and After Eights? I’m obviously older than I thought. And everyone knows you can get Cadbury’s creme eggs all the year round now.

Meanwhile, on the carnival front, I’ve once again missed the Dietfurt carnival where everyone dresses up as Chinese (or should that be ‘Chinese’?)

The Guardian interviews five people who were students in the 1970s and 1980s, taking them back to their universities to see how things have changed.

They include Gary Younge, who studied Russian and French translation and interpreting at Heriot-Watt University from 1988 to 1992.

In languages, this meant three types of interpreting – simultaneous, conference (summarising chunks of a speech) and liaison (acting as an intermediary) – as well as translation. We spent hours in the dictionaries room in the basement of the library , trying to find just the right word. We sat in booths wearing headphones trying to stop Jacques Delors or Mikhail Gorbachev racing away with the end of a sentence before we had finished rendering it into passable English.

And Stuart Jeffries did German (possibly inter alia) at Oxford, where remedial grammar classes are now held for some of ‘the brightest and best qualified in the country’.

This is fairly presented, identified for what it is, probably useful for the potential buyer, and yet – some texts are better suited to machine translation than others:

[AUTOMATED ENGLISH TRANSLATION BELOW]
The monument-protected messuage claimant as rider hotel and stud. 1985 were constantly continued the main house reconditioned and at all buildings. Therefore the former manor is in a maintained condition. The park-similar exterior installation with old tree existence rounds the picture off. Zupachtung of pasturelands is conceivable. This historical ensemble has nearly boundless variants of use with numerous extension possibilities. Please you visit also our homepage with our extensive real estate offer under: http://www.pfeiffer koberstein immobilien.de/. we look forward to you! Buyer commission: 3,48% of the selling price; Pfeiffer and Koberstein real estates GmbH, specialized broker for agricultural messuages, upper Gaensaecker 23, 74673 Mulfingen, Germany, Tel.: 0049 7938-9926-0, fax: 0049 7938-9926-10, email: info@pfeiffer koberstein immobilien.de, registry office Swabian-resound…

There was an amazing query on Proz.com recently, headed Mücke zum Elefanten.

The situation was a speech balloon in a cartoon about making mammoths from their DNA. A fly is sitting on a scientist’s desk and saying: maybe you can’t turn me into an elephant, but I might make a mammoth. (A play on words from the meaning ‘to make a mountain out of a mole hill’).

This was to be translated into English.

The solution wasn’t bad (Andrew Swift:”OK, maybe my DNA isn’t up to cloning an elephant but I’m sure I’’d make a pretty good mammoth.”). I wonder what the payment was?

In this connection, there’s an excellent article (in German) by Nina-Sattler-Hovdar in today’s ADÜ-Nord Infoblatt (click on Publikationen, then Infoblatt, and select Infoblatt 1/2007/), based on her talk for the ATA last year, suggesting what to do if a client requests what is effectively copywriting. She also explains how one might go about charging and doing this kind of work if one wants to, and pleads for a category of copywriting (Texten) in translator directories.

LATER NOTE: Here’s another coot that crossed my path last week.