Yesterday my company received a Request for Proposal (RFP) in French.

Now, I am a US citizen living and working in Germany. In our office in Munich, we have folks from a lot of different countries including Spain, Poland, UK and India. But no one from France. (Murphy’s Law)

This time, instead of sending the 40-plus pages out to a translator and paying around 15 Euro cents per word (more if you want it faster than in 4-5 working days), we decided to try out an automated translation program.

We went to a site called Linguatec, paid €240 with a credit card and expected to have a translation in 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, getting our credit card approved by Linguatec took longer than running the translation. We did not get approval to download their software until the next business day!

The software from Linguatec managed to get through the first 7 page Word document pretty well. It didn’t handle the formatting, including numbered lists, so the translated file had to be cleaned up a bit by hand before anybody could read it. But the result was at least comprehensible. Here are a few examples:

Example 1:

Participation at the invitation to tender So that your answer be consideration by our services, you have to have first initialed every page, signed and without no addition nor mention modificationing of some nature which is the document of General Conditions Purchases, edition September 2003 Example 2:

The offers have to be written in French language up.

The validity of the offers has to be at least 90 days.

The offers can be addressed by mail, by mail or deposited at the concerned persons ‘ secretariat. No receipt will be signed.

Ok, so the translations aren’t perfect, but I can understand this better than I can understand the original French.

We are planning on writing our proposal in English, using the tool to pre-translate into “French language up” and then getting a native speaker to polish it all up. Although, the formatting alone will be a big job; we might want to rethink that plan…

What do you do when you receive customer information in a language you can’t understand?

Image from origin.cdc.gov.

Post from: EveryJoe

Automated Translation – Not Too Bad

Indeed the general concept applies also to Asia where, for example, whole sentences in Japanese will be different, depending on what level of politeness you need to use. Remember that old 80’s pop song “Domo arigato Mister Roboto” from Styx? “Domo” means “thanks” in Japanese; “domo arigato”, one level of politeness up, means “thank you very much”. Take it up one more notch and it is “domo arigato gozaimasu”, which would be like “thank you very much with sugar on top”. You get the picture.

Back to Europe. The distiction between the formal and informal you (in French vous/tu, in spanish usted/tu, in German Sie/du) is an understated way (and so many things in Europe are understated – concepts like Las Vegas and bling bling are children of the new world) to distance yourself from others.

One way to understand the two forms of you is to think of people whom you have never called by their first name. Mr. Becker was our elderly neighbor for almost 20 years; not even my parents would have thought to call him by his first name. If there was a formal you in English, you can bet we would have used it with him.

In general, the barriers are falling as people who would be Herr Schmitt and Monsieur LaCroix change to Klaus and Francois during meetings in English. In Sweden they have just about buried their formal “you” form, which just goes to show how progressive and egalitarian Sweden is.

Helmut Kohl, who was chancelor of Germany from 1982 to 1998, was not known for his expert command of the English language. The story goes that when he first met Ronald Reagan, he shook hands and said “you can say you to me”. Germans find this story very amusing, but there are few Americans who understood the context – Kohl was offering to Reagan that they could be informal and use first names. I wonder how the interpreters got that one straightened out?

Post from: EveryJoe

You can say you to me