Ridiculousness
You know what kind of translations I hate the most?
“No,” you say. “We couldn’t care less.” (Unless, of course, you’re American, in which case you say “We could care less,” which, I’m sorry, doesn’t make any sense.)
Well, regardless of whether you could or couldn’t care less, I’m going to tell you anyway. Ready?
Spreadsheets.
This morning this ridiculous mess arrived in my inbox with a request to translate it by 5:00pm:
Yes, a single A3-size sheet of paper, stuffed full with all sorts of charts, graphs, boxes and lists, all requiring translation into English. Never mind that an English sentence requires something like a minimum of three times as much space as its Japanese counterpart; splitting the document up isn’t an option. And thus, in an effort to preserve the formatting, text is shrunk, columns are widened and even more hair is lost from my rapidly balding head.
The worst part is that deep down, I know that no one is actually going to read it. Sure, it might be skimmed, glanced at, looked over, but certainly no careful perusal is going to be taking place. Thus is the triviality of the translation of spreadsheets. A letter has its recipient, a presentation has its audience, but a spreadsheet exists for no one.
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maybe just to check if people do read it, you should toss something off the wall in there.
“C is for Cookie”
Comment by Hunter — 3/21/2006 @ 11:04 am
Wow that blows~
Comment by dave — 3/21/2006 @ 4:52 pm
Perhaps you can add some humor into it Jeff…like dotting the i’s with little happy faces, and o’s with little winking faces…d’s as sticking their tongues out at those who’ll read this chart…
Something cute…is in order…in any event, my condolences on formatting this document..
Comment by Rob — 3/21/2006 @ 9:13 pm
that sucks dude.
Comment by Ubaldo — 3/22/2006 @ 12:17 am
I use to do the kind of work you have to, but after three years of that I finally snapped. I remember the charts very well, there were cases where they would jam some technical BS term in there (i.e. quadrature modulation), and since the English is much longer, it wouldn’t fit, and then the management would have a fit, and since I was the only English speaker there, in an office building (branch) of over 1000, things were in a really sad state.
More power to you, but don’t overdo it; I was worked to the point of a nervous breakdown over the assignment of 4300 pages of technical documentation (on paper, but no soft copy existed for most of it) and the failure to complete it all in a month (I’m not joking; management was dead serious). Don’t let that happen to you.
Comment by seishinbyou — 3/22/2006 @ 11:45 am
The funny this is that I probably could get away with sticking random words or sentences in here and there. I doubt that even the people who draw these things up care enough to check my translations. Of course, the strong personal integrity and professionalism that I possess would never allow me to do such a thing.
Seishinbyou: Yikes
I couldn’t even imagine translating 4300 pages of anything, let alone doing it all in one month! I probably would have a nervous breakdown just from being handed such an assignment. . . .
Comment by jeff — 3/22/2006 @ 11:04 pm
Here’s what we do with complex charts/financial reports where I work:
Assign each item on the chart a number and then translate on a separate piece of paper. It will save loads of time on trying to get the layout right.
Unless this if for a presentation of some kind, I am sure the client/employer would agree with you that those spreadsheets are only used to make figures easily available, making painstaking adjustment of the layout a waste of time and money.
If it is for a presentation or other public/client consumption, it would be more efficient if you kicked the text back to the graphics people so they can work on adjusting the layout.
Comment by Adamu — 3/29/2006 @ 6:36 am
Ha ha, “graphics people!”
My company is so nowhere near that tech-savvy. Everyone just makes their own letters/charts/ presentations/whatever based on their own templates and it all gets thrown on to my desk to fix. They company tries to get people to use standardized templates and styles and all that, but so few people actually do. Most of them don’t even understand the very basics of putting documents together in a way that is effective and appealing to the end user.
Comment by jeff — 3/31/2006 @ 2:38 am