Why Restaurants Should Never Trust Machine Translation

A few days ago, my family was planning to go out for dinner in celebration of a special occasion. By the end of the day, we were all so exhausted that it sounded like a much nicer idea to just order some Chinese food and relax at home instead. We pulled out our stack of carryout menus and found the one for what is widely considered to be the best Chinese restaurant in town. The restaurant is actually owned and operated by a Chinese family, and the food is great - none of those tasteless, oily noodles you might find elsewhere. However, there was just one problem: the menu.

If you're at least somewhat adventurous when it comes to cuisine, then you've probably encountered a poorly translated menu before, be it at home or in a foreign country while you're on vacation. Sometimes there's just an item or two on the menu that sounds a bit off, like the time I discovered "sawdust" listed as a dessert on a menu in Portugal. Other times, however, the whole menu has clearly been thrown into Google Translate, with a horrible end result.

I'm pretty sure this was one of those times.

I can honestly say that I've never seen such a horribly translated menu before in my life. The issues were seemingly endless, which resulted in lots of confusion as to what we should order, as well as plenty of laughs. Here are some highlights:

A section of the menu in question.

"Ricer & Noodle" and "Beef Lamb": These section headings could easily have been corrected if the menu had been proofread before printing.

"Three Ingredient Potstickers" vs. "Potstickers": I love potstickers. They're one of my favorite items, and I was intrigued by the promise of "three ingredients". However, this translation didn't do the restaurant any favors. It was so ambiguous that I decided not to take the risk, since I didn't want to order potstickers that might be filled with something I don't like, which lost them an additional $4.

"Pine Nuts w. Wheat Gluten & Peppers": I imagine this item doesn't sell very well, given the current popularity of gluten-free diets. Based on its name, I envision chopped pine nuts and bell peppers in some sort of mushy paste, perhaps. Even stranger is the fact that this item is listed in the "Seafood" section...

"Fine Shred Potato w. Spicy Capsicum": If you know a bit of Latin, you can figure out that this vegetarian dish has some kind of hot peppers in it, since Capsicum is the plant genus that contains pepper species, but it still doesn't sound very appetizing.

"Crab Yolk & Bean Curd": Since when do crabs have yolks? Or does this contain crab, egg yolk, and bean curd?

"Lamb in Thin Wrap": This item was my personal favorite. It's probably some sort of thin rice wrap with lamb in it, but I imagined an adorable lamb with a thin shawl draped over its back to keep it warm.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The menu was a bit of a disaster. After spending ages looking it over, laughing, and trying to decide if we were feeling adventurous enough to order various poorly worded items, we finally made our relatively safe selections.

The food was indeed delicious as usual (including the potstickers), but I still felt let down by the menu. I love trying new things, but I also like to know what I'm eating, which is why I ended up ordering beef lo mein as my main dish instead of something new and exciting.

I can't help but think that this restaurant and the thousands of others like it who use Google Translate to translate their menus are missing out on great opportunities, both to earn more money and to expand their customers' culinary horizons. The worst translations on these machine-translated menus generally correspond to the most expensive items, since more complex dishes are harder to translate. It's not hard to find translators nowadays (especially with the help of the internet), and the cost of hiring a professional to translate a menu would be relatively small compared to the profits it could lead to in the future!

So if there are any restaurant owners out there, I beg you, please hire a professional to translate your menu instead of using a machine translation. The next time an adventurous diner visits your restaurant, they'll be much more likely to try your finest items if you're marketing them with well-worded translations.

Why the "Easiest" Terms Can Often Be the Hardest to Translate

One of the things that has most surprised me in my work as a translator is the fact that it's often basic vocabulary and tiny words that cause the most trouble. If you're doing a good job as a translator and paying close attention to detail, you will certainly have to ask your client for more insight into the text from time to time.

When a translator asks a client for clarification, it doesn't mean that they're bad at their job. In fact, it often means the opposite! The job of the translator is to convert the text into their native language in a way that accomplishes the client's goals. For example, the goal of a marketing text is generally to sell a product, while scientific texts often focus on conveying detailed information.

I've been working on lots of legal texts lately, and have been amused to notice that it's not the complex legal terminology that requires me to ask for further clarification, but instead tiny words in Spanish that can sometimes be ambiguous, especially when immersed in legalese.

In my experience, two of the worst Spanish words in terms of ambiguity are su and le. The term su is the third-person singular possessive adjective ("his"/"her"), while le is the third-person singular personal pronoun ("him/"her"). However, in many Spanish speaking countries they use the third-person singular as a way of formally addressing someone, which allows these terms to also mean "your" and "you" respectively.

While it certainly makes sense for legal professionals and their clients to address each other formally, if they don't also use the formal term for "you", usted (also written Ud.), elsewhere in the text, it's only natural to think that the text may be referring to some other person. Context can often help, but sometimes it can be so unclear that you simply have to reach out to your client and ask.

If you don't ask for help, you risk horribly mistranslating the entire text, which can have a large impact on something of a legal nature. There is a big difference between saying "I informed him" and "I informed you", and so on.

Basic vocabulary words can also cause problems from time to time when translating between Spanish and English. I've particularly noticed this in relation to terms for family members found in literary texts, such as hijos, padres, and hermanos. In Spanish, there is no specific neutral term that refers to "children", "parents", and "siblings". Instead, they use the plural of the corresponding masculine family members, which can also be translated as "sons", "fathers", and "brothers".

In some cases, the ambiguity of these terms doesn't matter at all because it is unnecessary to distinguish between genders, so you can use the neutral English terms. However, sometimes the genders of the people involved can matter, especially in a story. When a character is being introduced at the beginning of a story and it says that they have five hermanos, they could be referring to siblings of both genders or brothers. If you translated it as five "brothers", you could later learn that they actually have four sisters and a brother, which could subtly change how readers view the character.

This is why every detail matters to translators, no matter how small. If you ever do hire a translator and they ask for clarification regarding a term like this that seems simple or unimportant, keep in mind that they're actually hard at word deciphering each and every ambiguity that exists in your original text in order to ensure that they convey your ideas as accurately as possible.

Why Translation Is A Fascinating Career

If you're not a translator, you might think that translation would be a really boring career - after all, a translator's primary task is to take someone else's writing and convert it into a different language (which should be their native language, if you want the translation to sound natural). On the surface, it doesn't sound like a particularly fun or creative job. However, I'm here to tell you that if you think translation is boring, you're completely wrong!

Since I completed my master's degree in translation, I have translated all kinds of texts, and each one has taught me new things and required the use of different skills. When I translated a tourism brochure for a Spanish town on the Mediterranean coast, I spent the week learning about different types of fish that they use in all kinds of delicious recipes, many of which I had never heard of before. If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be researching fish species for work, I would have told you that you were crazy.

A few weeks later, I translated an entire e-book on agile web development. I certainly wasn't an expert on the topic when I started (I didn't even know what "agile" referred to), but through extensive research while translating, I became at least somewhat knowledgeable about the subject. Soon after, the topic randomly came up in conversation with friends, and I was excited to be able to apply that new knowledge.

I spent an entire week on a translation related to industrial lubricants used in machinery. Sure, it was boring, but there was still the occasional amusing moment when I would use Google to verify certain terminology and end up getting results related to other types of lubricants. I've translated marketing materials for furniture sales, cover letters for people applying to jobs, magazine articles about famous artists, and each one has allowed me to dive into new topics and learn new things, as well as increase my Spanish vocabulary (and occasionally my English vocabulary too!).

One of the most fun projects was translating a short story about a dystopian society that is struggling to survive after a cataclysmic event. While most translation projects do have an element of creativity simply because there are always linguistic choices for you to make ("Should I use terrific or fantastic here?"), literary projects are often brimming with opportunities to be creative. As I translated the story, I had to imagine the world the writer had invented, consider how to translate the names of items they'd created that don't exist in reality, and think about how the characters' dialogue should be written, all so that the eventual reader would get just as lost in the story as I had been.

Throughout my degree program, we were told that the best way to be a successful translator is to choose a specialization, and many translators do this. There are people who only translate official documents like CVs, those who stick to legal documents, and people who build an entire business around translating financial reports.

I can certainly see the benefit of doing this, since specializing in one type of translation means you can focus on learning the specific terminology related to it. For example, a legal translator would (hopefully) quickly become an expert in legal terminology and the format of legal texts, and therefore be able to complete translations more quickly, and most likely to a higher quality.

The problem is, I love the variety that being a translator can provide. They say that "variety is the spice of life", and I wholeheartedly agree. I love that one day I can be translating a dry academic paper, and the next day I can be working on a literary translation filled with metaphors. I never know what I'm going to learn about next, which I find exhilarating. I know that I'm new to this business, and perhaps in a year or two I'll decide that I'd rather zero in on one specific topic in order to make my life a bit more routine and the translations more predictable. For now though, I'm just going to enjoy going where the translations take me.

The Problematic Nature of the Word "American"

During last week's Fourth of July celebrations in the United States, I saw something very interesting on the internet: someone wishing their "fellow USians" a happy Independence Day. The use of this incredibly awkward-sounding term led me to start thinking about why they used it, which I can only imagine is due to the problematic nature of using the word "American" to refer to people from the United States.

While many people in the United States have never stopped to think about it, our use of the term "American" as our traditional demonym was probably not the most culturally sensitive choice. Why, you ask? Well, that would be because the "America" in "United States of America" refers to the Western Hemisphere where our country is located, which is also known as America or the Americas since it includes the continents of North America and South America.

This means that technically, every single person from the northernmost point in Canada to the southernmost point in Chile is an American. While our friendly English-speaking neighbors to the north don't seem to mind our appropriation of the term for our own personal use, Spanish speakers throughout the many countries to the south are not always of the same opinion.

In fact, if you've ever studied Spanish or visited a Spanish-speaking country, you might have been surprised to learn that the Spanish demonym for someone from the United States is estadounidense, which rolls off of the tongue so much more nicely than "United Statesan" ever could. In Spain, for example, if you say that you're americano or americana, you might be asked what country you're from, since those terms are generally applied to anyone from the Americas. The Real Academia Española, the official language institution of Spain, even suggests that use of the term americano to refer to people from the United States should be avoided.

Throughout most of the rest of the world however, the terms used to refer to people from the United States are often cognates of the word "American", such as américain in French and Amerikaner in German. They may have chosen these terms because it was easier than trying to create a nice-sounding demonym from their translation of "United States", but they also probably didn't care much about using it to refer only to people from the U.S. since most of their speakers don't live in the Americas, and therefore couldn't be upset by it.

With that said, while I do think it is incredibly unfortunate that the United States has been using a culturally insensitive term to refer to its people since the late 1700s, I don't think there's much we can do to change it now. People have tried to popularize alternative terms for centuries, but they've never caught on. They include Usonian, the aforementioned USian, Washingtonian, and worst of all Columbian, based on the poetic name for the United States, because what the world really needed was confusion as to whether they're referring to people from the United States or Colombia.

In the end, I think that all we can do is accept the mistake that was made centuries ago and try our best not to offend the millions of other Americans throughout our hemisphere. When visiting other countries in the Americas, it shouldn't be too hard to use estadounidense instead of americano or to simply say that we're "from the United States" instead of using the word "American".

The Plight of the Mockingjay: Translating Film Titles

Throughout my recent trip around Europe, I was frequently reminded of my interest in translation, particularly in relation to film titles. As I slowly made my way from the Netherlands to Spain, I encountered numerous film posters in various European languages. However, the one promotional poster I saw everywhere was for the latest addition to The Hunger Games series. I found the translation of its title in various European languages particularly fascinating, so today I've decided to look into a few of the many ways it was translated worldwide.

For those of you who don't know what film I'm referring to, it's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, which is based on and named after the final book in the extremely popular series The Hunger Games, written by Suzanne Collins.

     A mockingbird, or sinsonte in Spanish.

If you haven't read the books, then you might be wondering what on earth a "mockingjay" is. (Don't worry, no spoilers!) It is a fictional bird in the novel which is said to be a cross between a mockingbird and a "jabberjay", a fictional bird that can memorize and repeat human conversations.

While in Spain,  I saw posters for Los juegos del hambre: Sinsajo - Parte 1 everywhere, and I kept wondering what the term sinsajo meant since I'd never seen it before. After doing some research upon my return home, I discovered that the Spanish translator had actually translated the fictional term "mockingjay"! They arrived at the word sinsajo by combining sinsonte and arrendajo, the Spanish words for "mockingbird" and "blue jay". Without doubt, this is my favorite foreign title for the film since the translator took the initiative to create a new term just as Collins had instead of merely borrowing the term "mockingjay" into Spanish.

However, most other translators seemed to take a different route to translating the title. The French, Italian, and Portuguese titles all refer not to the fictional bird, but instead to a "revolt" or "rebellion". The English title, Mockingjay, refers to the symbolism of the mockingjay as a sign of rebellion, so this decision does make sense... it is just a far more direct reference to the plot of the book/film than the more subtle original title.

In French, the film is known as Hunger Games: La révolte - 1ère partie, in Portuguese it is called The Hunger Games: A Revolta - Parte 1, and in Italian it is named Hunger Games: Il canto della rivolta - Parte I. Interestingly, while the French and Portuguese versions translate literally as "The Revolt" or "The Rebellion", the Italian version is slightly more complex and creative, referring to the "call" or "song" of said rebellion.

If any other translators can provide insight into other interesting translations of this film's title, please let me know! I'd also love to hear about other film titles you know of that have been translated into other languages in a particularly fascinating way.

Movie Review: Ocho Apellidos Vascos

It has been ages since I last watched a foreign-language film, so I decided to remedy that situation this weekend. My choice was Ocho apellidos vascos, a new Spanish comedy by director Emilio Martínez Lázaro, which translates as "Eight Basque Surnames". Since its release in April 2014, it has become the most watched film in the history of Spain.

The film tells the story of Rafa (Dani Rovira), a man from the southern Spanish city of Sevilla, who travels to the northern Basque Country in order to romantically pursue a feisty Basque girl named Amaia (Clara Lago). At the start Amaia wants nothing to do with him, but a surprise visit from her father Koldo, a proudly Basque fisherman, changes her mind. Through a ridiculously hilarious series of events, Rafa helps Amaia by spending a few days pretending to be Antxón, a full-blooded Basque man (as proven by his eight Basque surnames), with the help of Merche, a lovely Spanish widow. Don't worry, I haven't spoiled anything for you - all of this is in the trailer!

Besides the fact that Ocho apellidos vascos was the funniest film I've seen in ages, I was particularly fond of it due to its linguistic and cultural focus. Much of its humor is centered on the fact that Rafa is a typical sevillano with a strong andaluz accent, yet in order to "get the girl" he must completely change his accent, his name, and even his clothes, not without difficulty. Some of the film's most entertaining moments come when Rafa (as Antxón) is pressured to speak Basque, a language he doesn't know at all. The film is certainly worth a watch for Spanish speakers, though some of the comedy may be lost on those who are unfamiliar with Spain's culturally diverse regions and their associated stereotypes.

While the film is certainly not a thought-provoking cinematic masterpiece, I highly recommend it to anyone who knows Spanish and loves a good comedy.

Have you seen Ocho apellidos vascos? Let me know what you thought of it! I'd also love to hear any other foreign language film recommendations you have.

Movie Review: Los Amantes Pasajeros

Today I'm going to take a moment to write about the most recent film from Spain's most internationally known director, Pedro Almodóvar. If you've never seen an Almodóvar film, you're in for an eye-opening experience upon viewing Los amantes pasajeros. His films are certainly not to everyone's taste, so if you're easily offended, especially by sex and drug use, then this may not be the film for you. However, those who are open to just about any film will quite possibly find themselves laughing out loud at the utter ridiculousness the characters become immersed in.

The film centers on the front section of a flight headed from Spain to Mexico that encounters a technical problem. Three flight attendants try their hardest to entertain the privileged few who are seated in business class. Half the fun of the film is learning about the characters, so suffice it to say that they're an interesting group who learn each other's secrets as they panic over their possible impending doom. I'll leave the film up to others to interpret, but desire and relationships are certainly integral themes. 

If you're fluent in Spanish, I recommend watching the film in its original language. For those who are still learning or have let their Spanish skills get a bit rusty, finding a version with English subtitles might be the way to go. The female characters, especially Bruna (played by Lola Dueñas), speak much more slowly and clearly than the hilarious male flight attendants, who are much more animated. 

One key term you may want to know is Agua de Valencia, which despite its name, is not water from Valencia. It's actually a cocktail that combines cava or champagne, orange juice, gin, vodka, and in the case of the film, one other extra special ingredient.

The title of the film has a dual meaning, as it refers to "lovers" (amantes) who are pasajeros, which can mean either "fleeting" or "passengers". It's a very cleverly titled film, as both connotations are apt. In English, a literal translation would not provide the same meaning, and it was instead named I'm So Excited. This seems like a strange choice, but it's actually a nod to my favorite part of the film, a musical number performed by the flight attendants to the famous song by The Pointer Sisters. If you're looking for a light film to enjoy and 90 minutes of Spanish practice, you should definitely check it out.