Snakes In The Ball Pit => Yay, I get to talk about me! => This Is A Thing I Made => Topic started by: Fanzay on September 12, 2015, 03:46:56 pm
Title: I helped translate this animation
Post by: Fanzay on September 12, 2015, 03:46:56 pm
It's called "Cooperation pays off" and it was made primarily for showing how our municipal governance works (or is supposed to work, anyway). Then someone decided that it would be a good idea to have an English version to show off for whenever certain parts of our labour unions work on projects abroad.
The voice-over is a bit too fast for my liking, but that's because English has a lot more syllables than Norwegian does, and we decided that we absolutely couldn't cut anything.
Title: I helped translate this animation
Post by: Emperor Jack Chick on September 13, 2015, 11:49:12 am
Yeah the first part is totally impenetrable. Really dense verbiage delivered rapidly.
"The solution is rarely durable or well working" is a great example of a functionally correct sentence that makes me, as a native speaker, go "what the hell?" That was the only weird example I was able to find.
Great work dude!!
Title: I helped translate this animation
Post by: Fanzay on September 17, 2015, 09:24:31 am
Thanks!
The sentence you're highlighting is unfortunately one of the parts of the script I got overruled on. If it were up to me, We'd have cut it, but them's the breaks. If I had my way, we would have rewritten the whole script and made a different version of the animation to make it less busy. At least it semi-works, and I'm not too ashamed of adding it to my translation portfolio.
Edit: Okay, so here's how the process of translating it went. I was shown the Norwegian version, with a loose "we hope to translate this to English". Three weeks pass, and I was shown a tentative version in English. It was a clusterfuck, and I wish I still had that version somewhere. This led to me sending a very colourfully worded email to the project manager, and as such Fagforbundet (the Union I worked for) hopefully will never employ that particular translator again.
I was never shown the script as is, so I had to write down the whole thing while listening to it. Great. Then I had to sit down with the project manager to talk about tone and overall message, to which I at first got a reply of "What do you mean you want to sit down and talk about this? Our regular translator just does the work." at which point I in no uncertain terms told him that the translation was passable as a grade-school level essay.
So yeah, a lot of the density and word saladness is both of necessity, and a legacy of an incompetent translator and project manager. This is why I say I 'helped' translate it, rather than saying I translated it wholesale. (PS: Originally they didn't want to spring for an actual native English speaker to narrate, but I put my foot down)