Of coating, liner and rework
Quite an outstanding video conference system that was... Wow, you'd see the guy on the screen momentarily leave the meeting for some coffee or tea, and you'd expect him to make it back through your meeting room door... But when it came to translation quality...
A rather bustling meeting that was, with lots of heated discussions on a design detail or another, on both sides of the Atlantic, or Pacific, with geography classes seeming like foggy reminiscences in a far-away academic past one would doubt their sheer existence. Engineers, procurement guys (I vividly remeber someone having referred to them as "gods", instead of guys - not my words, please!), minutes of meeting takers, oh my, that was all boiling over around me, the technical interpreter.
Then it happened: the hopper design on the screen had no wear plates whatsoever! With such an abrasive ore they'd be dealing with, that would be thoroughly unnacceptable!
"Something's missing on that design! What the heck has happened with them wear plates? Mad as a hatter that guy there! A screwball, I'd say!!"
"Yep, you can say that again! It says there only paint coats will be placed on the hopper walls! Holy s***! What's that thing supposed to be?"
On and on went the debate on whom to blame for that, until it dawned on me to ask one of the guys to let me take a look at the technical specification and data sheet mentioning the "naked" hopper.
"Yes, that's what I mean: the ones you've sent over to them! In English!"
Bull's eye: it was there right before my very eyes! "Coating" instead of "liner" and no sign of them wear plates... And later on, I could see that was not the only mistranslated term in the documents: there was a "vast array" of misconceived "terms" and things that meant nothing at all in technical lingo.
"What are we gonna do with it all? There's no time to fix it all up! It'd take months"
A week later my team had finished translating all documents from scratch. I mean, we'd taken over the challenge of "retranslating" all the Portuguese originals into comprehensible technical language ready to be resubmitted to the "baffled" designers on the other side of the... well, whatever ocean that was!
Rework: you'll probably have to face this "monster" should quality not be envisioned on your original action plan! Or you can leave it to "abrasiveness" to do its work on your project "hopper"...
#hopper #wearplate #coat #translation #technicaltranslation #design #liner
Tradutor técnico na Amapá Business.
7 年Technical translations are always challenging, in addition to difficulties in the terminology itself there are also regional veriations that, depending on the writer is from, makes translation almost impossible.
Mechanical Design Specialist
7 年This can be an issue with technical translations to different languages as sometimes terms used are a kind of industry slang which add to to the misinterpretation. Not often goes it happen but a good principal to adopt on projects where translation is needed is to use real terminologies industry standards and full length descriptions not abbreviations. If using abbreviations which can also be misinterpretted then supply and abbreviation legend of meaning or denotes on each drawing.
Project and Construction Specialist, Operations, Governance and Land Management
7 年Congrats my friend. Always improving communication....and projects rsrsrs