Pitfalls of 'Translations'

We had been advised to take a leaflet in Arabic to the GESS Exhibition in Dubai. It proved excellent advice. With zero knowledge of Arabic, we started with a translation agency, one which had been recommended to us.

They made several mistakes, firstly in layout, making it impossible for us to drop the outline .eps files into our leaflet, then we spotted no less than three mistakes in the English address, which shouldn't really have been re-keyed. This made our noses twitch. So Steve took the 'professional' translation to work and asked an Egyptian colleague to cast an eye over the Arabic translation and give an opinion.

The Egyptian colleague (Yasser) said it made no sense, it was translated so literally that it could have been done by translation software. We sent it back to the agency and they had two more goes at it with no better results. In the end Yasser translated it for us himself and we had all the problems coping with the RtoL script as described in the last post.

I took both versions to the exhibition and asked opinions. Yasser's version explained our book and audio CDs, rather than 'translated' our leaflet. The original leaflet had of course been aimed at the English speaking market. So Yasser's explanation made far more sense to the Arabic speaking world than did the literal translation.

This was corroborated by the rep from the British Embassy, Cairo, who said they always have to get translations from the UK re-worked; and ditto from the British Embassy Jordan, who talked me through the whole agency translation explaining word for word what was wrong with it.

So in the end, we were lucky. Just think. We are a multilingual enterprise, present under the auspices of the UKTI. A tacky translation would have completely undermined our street cred.

There are more lessons here - but we're not completely sure about recommending a solution. Trust is the key. If you possibly can, seek a first hand, trustworthy solution to any translation requirements.