Every month begins with new challenges. The month of August was extremely busy for me but surprisingly I managed to maintain a work-life balance and spend an amazing week with friends in Austria.
One of the projects I worked on inspired me to write this month’s post. I was asked by a real estate company based in northern Poland to translate their website and promotion video. Target audience: German customers who want to benefit from the spiking currency rates of Euro and desire to purchase a property next to the sea. However, what I was initially asked for was to correct the initial translation of the website. As usually when people ask me for a correction of a poor text, I refused, so the client asked me to make it from scratch. That was a challenge I was up to. I dared to have a sneak peak of the initial translation and all saw was a copy-paste work from Google Translate. Don’t get me wrong, I think this tool has improved spectacularly over the past years but It’s not a good translation yet, that is ready to be posted on a website. There was a bunch of mistakes that could be found there but one of them ‘special’. I spent 10 minutes laughing at it and called my Austrian friends to laugh together. DES GIBT’S JA NED! That’s the only thing they said.
The company offered clients a sort of a show home apartment that would serve as a standard for renovation works. One could order a ready apartment, even with curtains and lamps. A cool idea, right? That’s what I thought too but not when you call it Modellwohnung. Why?
‘escorts’ apartments’ That’s a translation of the aforementioned expression that sheds light on what a Modellwohnung is.
The client wanted to offer clients Musterwohnungen but he ended up offering fishy services and elderly, retired German citizens definitely wouldn’t be his target group!
What do you think about it? Do you have similar experiences with machine translation or you’re a big fan of it? What do you think about this case? What is your opinion on using translation machines to cut down on costs? Leave a comment below.