Snakes In The Ball Pit > This Is A Thing I Made

I helped translate this animation

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Fanzay:
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.

Emperor Jack Chick:
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!!

Fanzay:
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)

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