How Bad is Buzzfeed in Translation?

For the past four months, Buzzfeed has been using students from the language-learning site Duolingo to translate its content into French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The bottom line, naturally, is that it’s cheaper: Duolingo (which claims to teach languages better than universities — a college education is really superfluous now that we have the Internet!) translates…

“Hot. Cool. Yours.” Really?

The Sochi Olympics begin today, with the official slogan “Hot. Cool. Yours.” Really? It sounds like those old ads for the McDLT. What were they thinking? According to the Sochi 2014 website, the word “Hot” represents “the intensity of sporting battle and the passion of the spectators, and it emphasizes the location of the Games, the…

Normal Or Not?

Translators always need to be aware of the nature of the message they’re translating. This may seem obvious, but different kinds of statements are aiming for different relationships to their audience. For instance, we usually think of clarity as a value in writing, and translators will even “clean up” the language a bit to make…

Garfield Translated into Russian

According to the Moscow Times, the comic strip Garfield has now been translated into Russian for the first time by Mikhail Khachaturov and is being published by Elf Comics. “Russia practically doesn’t have any of its own comics,” publisher Elena Depeille told the paper. “Apart from just translating Garfield, we want to create a culture of comics in…

Who Translated Vladimir Putin’s Op-Ed?

Vladimir Putin‘s op-ed in the New York Times (September 12 in the print edition) inspired reader curiosity (as well as heated online discussion, with some commenters forgetting that the opinion pages are exactly that — opinions). Public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote a blog post about how the op-ed came to be, explaining that an American…

Sprangles of Cataclysm

It is all too easy — for translators, or for anybody for that matter — to make fun of bad translations and poor command of English. But, for translators at least, we can always justify our mockery with the reasoning that we’re raising awareness about the importance of language skills and the need to rely…