Image courtesy of wordwealthy.com

Earlier this week I enjoyed reading a post called ‘The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases’ over at Adam Sherk’s blog (discovered courtesy of @Betti_Moser). Reading the post, it really struck me that high ‘bleurgh’ factor buzzwords like synergy, and dynamic tend to rear their ugly heads in languages other than English, too.

When I translate French press releases into English, for example, I can usually see straight away that the ‘bleurgh’ factor could be reduced by about 70%. The tone of French press releases is often a lot more gushing and flowery than you’d normally see in English, so that’s one challenge. But the individual words themselves present a second, delicious challenge.

Synergie and dynamique are of course words with French origin, but do they really mean anything in either language, or are they just linguistic padding? I suspect that in both languages they are used in marketing texts to give the reader a warm fuzzy feeling about the product or service being sold. In fact, here’s an aside thought: how true would it be to say that use of these words in English marketing texts is to some extent a result of unimaginative translationease creeping into English? We’re all guilty of letting these words slip in, they’re part of our collective marketing vocabulary, and to a large extent we expect to see them. But we could probably all use them a little more sparingly (and I include myself in ‘we’!) and focus instead on packing in the information-bearing words.

I’m all in favour of warm fuzzy feelings as a marketing technique, but let’s not forget that in the highly competitive, fast-paced world we live in, consumers and customers are looking for the FACTS, presented in a digestible, appealing way. My personal view is that as a wordsmith (whether you’re translator, copywriter or writer), your mission if you choose to accept it is to use words to craft something that is a pleasure to read while conveying information in an unambiguous way.

Playing with words in this way is an art, and it takes time to perfect it. For help with copywriting, and writing in general, I highly recommend ‘Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide To Great Copywriting’ by Andy Maslen.

So which foreign language marketing buzzwords irk you the most? For me, it has to be synergie. Bleurgh!

Looking at the website of OneHour Translation, I’m sceptical (to say the least) about their ability to turn around larger documents (projects they say they can take on include websites and presentations) within just 1 hour. To me, the best use of this type of service is for something like Twitrans, not important or lengthy documents. What do others think about this type of service?

I was surprised to read, however, that the translator was fired for ‘changing the sex of several of the book’s characters’, including Toby the rat, to female. Her translation was deemed ‘feminist-biased’ by the publishers, who she is now taking to court. Hers did seem like a *curious* (geddit?) translation technique, but perhaps the case isn’t quite as black and white as it first appears. There’s been a lot of discussion about the case on translators’ forums, and the consensus seems to be that the translator herself should not necessarily be to blame, that it’s simply a confusion over the lack of neutral gender in Spanish grammar. Perhaps others would disagree….?

By way of example, the word ‘rat’ in Spanish is actually a feminine noun (‘la rata’) so it would just have been plain incorrect to use the masculine gender, and quite tricky to inform the reader that ‘Toby’ was in fact male, when presumably a Galician readership would not be familiar with the name ‘Toby’ .

The crux of the issue is whether the translator was sufficiently faithful to the original text, which is after all the primary concern of all translators, but I think it would be nice to see a translator get some good press for a change!

Watch the offending remark:

I just read this post at Naked Translations.com with interest, in the light of my new linguistic gaffes category. Could Tony Henry’s (above) embarrassing mistake when singing the Croatian national anthem have amused the Croats enough to give them the momentum they needed to defeat England? Very topical…!

Ok, so translation blunder #1 is about an EU census containing a question on ‘cohabitation’, which is erroneously translated as ‘consensual union’…. This has led widespread misunderstanding, and even outrage amongst EU-phobic newspapers and politicians.

The UK Independence Party, never one to miss an opportunity for EU-bashing, was one of the first to express their outrage, in an interview on the Radio 4 Today program this morning. You can listen to it here, with a wry smile as it gradually transpires that the cause of the confusion is in fact a particularly poor translation.

The news article is on BBC news.