| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | The plague of legalese Thread poster: Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
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| Someone needs to say it | Feb 4 |
finnword1 wrote:
LEGALESE:
Insofar as manifestations of functional deficiencies are agreed by any and all concerned parties to be imperceptible, and are so stipulated, it is incumbent upon said heretofore mentioned parties to exercise the deferment of otherwise pertinent maintenance procedures.
ENGLISH:
If it's not broken, don't fix it.
These do not mean the same thing
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Daryo wrote:
Christopher Schröder wrote:
Daryo wrote:
Translators who translate exactly what's in the source text in the way adapted to the intended target audience
I don’t follow what you mean here🤷♂️
I was under the impression that the concept of "target audience" is part of the basics of translating, but maybe it's lumped together with "context" and cheerfully ignored rather too often?
Here is is an example, never mind that I feel like stating the blindingly obvious:
If you had to translate a maintenance manual for a jet engine, would you be worried about Joe public not being capable to understand half of it? Or would you be careful to use terminology that is familiar to experts in jet engine maintenance? [Edited at 2024-02-03 02:55 GMT]
Well, apart from what you originally said not entirely making sense in English, you said it in a way that suggested you were being ironic/sarcastic, but I wasn’t sure. Turns out, several months later, that you weren’t.
So it wasn’t really blindingly obvious.
Oh, and you can’t assume a bit of legalese is intended for lawyers. Even then, I’m sure they’d appreciate being able to read it easily without having to decipher what it meant.
| | | | | Daryo, you picked the wrong example | Feb 5 |
Daryo wrote:
If you had to translate a maintenance manual for a jet engine, would you be worried about Joe public not being capable to understand half of it? Or would you be careful to use terminology that is familiar to experts in jet engine maintenance?
In the aviation field, the reality is almost opposite to what you think. Maintenance manuals are rarely translated, as the aircraft technicians are usually supposed to understand English. However, when creating maintenance manuals, regardless of the language, aerospace manufacturers take into account that they may be read by non-natives, and intentionally write in a manner that minimises possible misunderstanding. For English as the prevailing language of the industry, the European Association of Aerospace Industries created a special controlled dialect called ASD-STE-100 Simplified Technical English. A specification for it is over 400 pages long. Besides prescribed and prohibited words, it has a number of rules, for example:
- Do not use two different terms for the same item.
- Do not use verbs that are homonymic to nouns: instead of "screw the nut onto the bolt", write "install the nut onto the bolt".
- Do not use clusters of more than three nouns: instead of "remove the engine transmission housing attachment bolts", write "remove the bolts that attach the transmission housing to the engine".
- Do not use perfect tenses.
- Use only active voice in procedures, and use it as much as possible in descriptions.
- In procedures, write only one instruction per sentence unless two or more actions occur at the same time.
There were some initiatives in other languages, too. For example, the Soviet space program created a controlled language heavily relying on the use of flowcharts.
| | | | | Take most of these, change them to opposites, and... | Feb 5 |
Anton Konashenok wrote:
Do not use two different terms for the same item.
Do not use verbs that are homonymic to nouns: instead of "screw the nut onto the bolt", write "install the nut onto the bolt".
Do not use clusters of more than three nouns: instead of "remove the engine transmission housing attachment bolts", write "remove the bolts that attach the transmission housing to the engine".
Do not use perfect tenses.
Use only active voice in procedures, and use it as much as possible in descriptions.
In procedures, write only one instruction per sentence unless two or more actions occur at the same time
... you'll get the kind of language our main customer uses and wants us to use. Whether it's Russian or English, it will surely cause your eyes to bleed. One of their complaints mentioned that the use of active voice and personal pronouns in letters was undesirable for some reason (they never explain or provide reasons for anything), so as soon as I got a letter to translate, I wrote the translation entirely in the passive voice: whenever the source text mentioned an entity emdowed with agency and doing something, I'd rewrite it to mean that the thing in question was being done by that entity. This took some ingenuity. I wrote a comment highlighting this passivity feature and why it was there. They did not reply, so I used the same approach on the next letter that came my way. I'll never get tired of poking fun at certain people over certain things
[Редактировалось 2024-02-05 11:55 GMT]
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| Passive voice is a powerful obfuscation tool! | Feb 6 |
Denis Fesik wrote:
One of their complaints mentioned that the use of active voice and personal pronouns in letters was undesirable for some reason (they never explain or provide reasons for anything)
Oh yes, corporate executives and politicians love this kind of responsibility-shifting language: "Mistakes HAVE BEEN MADE".
| | | | | This is a very nice sentence in my opinion | Feb 6 |
Anton Konashenok wrote:
Denis Fesik wrote:
One of their complaints mentioned that the use of active voice and personal pronouns in letters was undesirable for some reason (they never explain or provide reasons for anything)
Oh yes, corporate executives and politicians love this kind of responsibility-shifting language: "Mistakes HAVE BEEN MADE".
I love legalese, of course into Italian, but I must say that the sentence above "Mistakes HAVE BEEN MADE" sounds wonderful to my hears.
| | | | Daryo
United Kingdom
Local time: 20:53
Serbian to English
+ ...
| Some few more months later ... | Jul 13 |
Christopher Schröder wrote:
Daryo wrote:
Christopher Schröder wrote:
Daryo wrote:
Translators who translate exactly what's in the source text in the way adapted to the intended target audience
I don’t follow what you mean here🤷♂️
I was under the impression that the concept of "target audience" is part of the basics of translating, but maybe it's lumped together with "context" and cheerfully ignored rather too often?
Here is is an example, never mind that I feel like stating the blindingly obvious:
If you had to translate a maintenance manual for a jet engine, would you be worried about Joe public not being capable to understand half of it? Or would you be careful to use terminology that is familiar to experts in jet engine maintenance? [Edited at 2024-02-03 02:55 GMT]
Well, apart from what you originally said not entirely making sense in English, you said it in a way that suggested you were being ironic/sarcastic, but I wasn’t sure. Turns out, several months later, that you weren’t.
So it wasn’t really blindingly obvious.
Oh, and you can’t assume a bit of legalese is intended for lawyers. Even then, I’m sure they’d appreciate being able to read it easily without having to decipher what it meant.
When I said
"Translators who translate exactly what's in the source text in the way adapted to the intended target audience are really a big problem!!! Why would anyone do that? High time to do something about it, surely?"
that was sarcastic.
"translate exactly what's in the source text in the way adapted to the intended target audience" is how translation should ALWAYS be done. Without reinventing your own version of the established terminology that a profession keep using because everyone in that profession knows exactly what every term means. Makes no difference if it's legal, politics, physics, medicine, aviation or theology.
Legal texts are primarily meant for the legal profession. Anyone else interested in making sense of them MUST learn at least some basic legal concepts - no ways of escaping that.
The fact that the exactly same correct terminology could be used to write easy to follow or disorganised confusing sentences is a different problem. You could rewrite a contract possibly in many ways, but you CAN NOT start inventing your own terms for legal concepts, or "deciding" to give them a different meaning of your own choosing. Same as for any other specialized terminology.
Ah yes, jet engine maintenance manuals. OK, they might well be written in an as clear English as possible (as they should be) BUT there is still no expectation that any Joe Public should be able to understand them. These instructions are still meant for trained mechanics only - NO ONE expects that the terminology used is so simplified that anyone could just walk in and start fixing a jet engine.
But somehow legal terminology should be "simplified" so that anyone with practically no knowledge of legal matters should be able to understand it immediately? Maybe in some alternative universe ....
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