Bloguinho do Danilo

    Published first in the Translation Journal,   October, 2002   It was a Powerpoint presentation, written in English in the U.S., translated into Portuguese in Brazil. The client had just called to say that the translation was unacceptable and they would not pay for the job. Too literal , the secretary had said. Now, I don’t think literality in itself is a problem. A translation is unacceptable if it violates the rules of the target language, if it belies the meaning of the original, or if it introduces needless changes in the style of the original. These three capital sins are as common in freer translations as they are in more literal ones. Once, I wrote an article on translating gobbledygook for the Translation Journal (reproduced here ) and I do believe technical translators, who often deal with unrevised and carelessly written texts, have the right to simplify or clarify a text that would otherwise be tenebrifically befuddling to its intended audi...

  Into English Seven survival tools for translating Brazilian Portuguese into English  This is an edited and updated version of a tongue-in-cheek article published by the Translation Journal, in October 2000, in its halcyon days when it was in the hands of my good friend Gabe Bokor. After a quarter of a century, it needed a bit of a brush-up, but I daresay it is still valid. But you be the judge. Some people handle gobbledygook in translation by the hallowed GIGO (gobbledygook in, gobbledygook out) method. I don't. I like my translations to be crystal-clear. The guys who read the stuff I translate are businesspeople and they do not have the time or the inclination to pore and ponder over a text, looking up words they don’t know  in an unabridged dictionary; they want to understand what they have to read the first time they skim through the text. If they don't, they say damn the translator, not damn the author. All this business of “crystal-clear translations for gobbledy...