Alice Roberts posted an interesting problem posed to a translator of one of her books.
https://twitter.com/thealiceroberts/status/1425444246321041414?s=21
https://twitter.com/thealiceroberts/status/1425444247776514052?s=21
I suspect a translator would need to be of a certain age as well as having a good knowledge of British culture to recognise the Smash advertisement.
I have just seen a tweet about a poor translation of advice into Polish https://twitter.com/TOrynski/status/1341540344832385024?s=20
The description of how poor it is makes use of back translation, a topic covered in L161. A famous, but perhaps jokey, example is the back translation of "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" from Russian to "the vodka is good but the meat is bad".
It is surprising that the authorities could not find a good translator for the advice, especially considering how large the Polish community is in the UK.
I found this talk on translating brand names into Chinese interesting:
It shows how creative translators need to be if the translation is to be effective. In some cases, as in the example of "mini", there is a "lucky" coincidence of sounds that matchg the original and a positive meaning (although, this new meaning rather changes the connotation of the original). In some cases, there has been more of a focus on the meaning and the original sound is lost and someone not speaking Chinese will not know what car is being referred to - as in the translation for Land Rover.
As I mentioned in a posting on 9 Feb 2011, there seem to be problems with the privatisation of interpretation services and this is referred to in today's Guardian at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/05/interpreters-courts-lost-translation-editorial
This seems to raise important issues about whether people's human rights are being eroded.
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