One of the purposes of this site is to bring together ongoing research — if that’s not too grand a word for it — into translation issues. I’m not yet sure of the best way of doing this, but to get the ball rolling I’ve created a page called ‘Diligent Research’ to which I’ve added a first entry on ‘Benelux versus the Benelux’. You can find the page in the contents list on the left (or the right if I’ve changed the blog theme in the meantime). If you have any other examples or would like to suggest a similar issue for us to track, then click on this link to mail me about it. Or comment on this post.
Translators need to be a little conservative when it comes to language use. That means tracking normal usage of words and expressions rather than trying to pioneer new ones. You can avoid having the same arguments over and over by recording observations of particular terms or expressions ‘in the wild’.
I do a lot of financial translation and writing, for instance, and so when I read The Economist or Financial Times I keep an eye open for fresh ways of expressing ideas and for how the journalists handle issues I’ve run into.
Sometimes — quite reassuringly, in fact — you come to the conclusion that they don’t know either. A while ago I had to write an article about the Polish city of Kraków, which the Oxford Style Manual (”The essential handbook for all writers and editors”) insists should be ‘Cracow’. I was seeing an awful lot of ‘Krakows’, though, not least in the English-language material on sale in the city itself. So I turned to the online edition of the Financial Times to help. It turned out that the paper had used both spellings, with the cultural writers in the minority preferring ‘Cracow’ and the business staff mostly using ‘Krakow’.
Clear-cut or not, it’s useful to be able to provide evidence. Especially when dealing with Dutch-speakers. Because the Dutch language area is largely confined to the Netherlands and Flanders, it is possible for the Dutch and Flemish governments to get together and codify the language by law. From time to time they publish the ‘Green Book’ of official spellings. Because of this unified approach to their own language, Dutch-speakers often respond with suspicion when you try to persuade them that in English “they’re both correct” or “it’s open to discussion”.
As the words, “What are we paying this idiot for?” begin to form in your customer’s mind, it’s good to be able to jump in with some hard data to back yourself up.