Lost in Translation

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Clarissa

July 9, 2014

Do respectable journals actually use Google Translate? See the following excerpt from a scholarly article:

Obviously, “highest rent” here stands for the highest income. But the careless translation changes the meaning of the article completely. People might come away from it thinking that in Spain those who rent live the high lifestyle of the rich and mighty.

The same article keeps referring to the middle-class and the working class as “popular classes”, which is another annoying calque from Spanish.

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4 responses to “Lost in Translation”

thevenerablecorvex

July 9, 2014

I don’t know the context of this study; I would have assumed, based on the above excerpt, that it was measuring correlations between average monthly rent (presumably as a proxy for a neighbourhood’s average income) and access to essential services.
However, speaking as a freelance academic editor, I can say for an absolute fact that some scholars do, indeed, using Google Translate (and then farm it out to luckless freelancers to pound it into coherent sentences).

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cliff arroyo

July 10, 2014

I see this kind of thing all the time (part time gigs as a ‘language editor’) of non-native speakers, mostly Polish, trying to write in English (there is very heavy pressure to do so now in Europe no matter how little real justification there is) and the editors either being non-qualified (either non-native or non-academic) or thinking they understood it when they didn’t (see venerable’s comment).

Differing meanings of cognates across european languages are being forced into English (see the pressure thing above) which means soon that more and more European academic articles in English will be all but incomprehensible. The structural integrity of English is taking very big hits now.

I’ve seen ‘rent’ used in Polish-English also, but with the Polish meaning (pension) and pension used with it’s Polish meaning (salary).

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Jones

July 10, 2014

There’s also the concept of “financial rents”, which would impart yet another flavour to the statements: collectors of high financial rents would indeed be able to send their children to any school they wish, given the fundamental realities of “rentiers” in economic terms.

Aside from the posh ghetto of Belgravia, where even the richest must pay the fees appropriate to the lord of the many manors, most rent-seekers are in a class well above those who are rent-payers …

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Lear

July 12, 2014

Looks more like a lapsus from the writer to me. Google sentences usually turn out to be have more quirks and sound even funnier.

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