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Topic: I helped translate this animation  (Read 2981 times)

Fanzay

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I helped translate this animation
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

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I helped translate this animation #1
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

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I helped translate this animation #2
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)
« Last Edit: September 17, 2015, 02:07:55 pm by Fanzay »