Translating gobbledygook
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...