Dear Client — Your In-House ‘Translator’ Is Not Awesome

Occasionally these days a client company will have someone in their organization that speaks a language other than English. This is especially the case for major languages such as Spanish, French, and one or two others.

Sometimes these lay linguists get tasked to review a delivered translation. The result is often unnecessary change recommendations and confusion for translation buyers.

 

 

Generally speaking if a person is tasked with reviewing a translation they will recommend changes. It’s as if not making changes to a translation is somehow not doing what they’ve been asked to do. A reviewer reviews and makes changes almost by definition.

What do business translation buyers receive for their money? They buy the judgment of a professional linguist that’s assigned to their project. When the judgment (approach to expressing meaning) of a translator is sufficiently altered, the result is something other than the translator’s professional judgment.

In general we recommend that lay reviewers of the work of professional translators tread extremely lightly.