Ccaps Blog

This is my farewell post as this is my last week at Ccaps. We never publish literary stuff here in the Ccaps Blog, but since this is a special occasion, I managed to make an exception…

At the Literature Workshop class, we were assigned a task: to write a narrative in English after listening to the folktale O menino que foi ao vento norte, by Brazilian storyteller Bia Bedran. Check out what I came up. This is a free adaptation of “Bia canta e conta.”

Boy, who had been shopping for his mother, was coming back home full of bags in his arms when North Wind took them all away. “Now what? How can I explain it to Mother?,” he thought.

Poor thief…
Hope to see you soon! Take care you all!

Hello there! For those of you who do not know me, my name is Natália Araújo and I work as a localization engineer at Ccaps. I have wanted to write a post for the Ccaps Blog but, until now, I could not find anything interesting to write about. Let me try…

Every month, I go to the news stand in search of magazines about general subjects, which in one way or another, will enrich my cultural baggage. Interestingly enough, I came across a magazine specializing in subjects about the Portuguese language, called “Conhecimento Prático da Língua Portuguesa” (Practical Knowledge of the Portuguese Language). The cover of issue 18 called my attention as it had the following headline: “Latin, a language that never goes out of style”.

I wondered how come a dead language could not go out of style… Like any voracious reader, I leafed through the pages to read the story and realized that, even superficially, Latin should be taught to everyone. And exactly at that moment I thought: “It would be great to write a post about the proper use of language in the Ccaps Blog.”

Let’s see. Does any of you know where the word “university” comes from? There I discovered that it comes from the Latin “universitas”, which means “universe”. Another example is the verb “to delete”, which comes from the Latin “delere”, meaning “to destroy”. And much to my surprise, the second person plural of the imperative of the verb “delere” is “delete”, just like that button on your keyboard!

I spoke with some friends who study Languages and confirmed that they all fear case declinations, conjunctions and other things they need to memorize in Latin. On the other hand, they all believe that studying Latin would help (a lot!) the common Brazilian to better understand what they are saying.

We often make mistakes because we do not know the origins of what we are saying. For instance, what is the plural of the Portuguese words “nação,” “pão” and “cristão”? To answer that, we should pay attention to the suffix of these three words. They all end in “-ão”, which is an irregularity in the Portuguese language that presents us with three possibilities in the plural: “-ães”, “-ões” and “-ãos”. But which one is correct?

Had we learned Latin, we would not such doubts, as “nação” comes from the Latin “natione”, so the correct plural form is “nações;” “pão” comes from “pane,” so the correct plural form is “pães;” and “cristão” comes from the Latin word “christianu,” and the correct plural form is “cristãos.”

But the most intriguing part of the story was to find out that even the biggest scholars in the Portuguese Language also butcher the language without even realizing it. Can somebody tell me the correct word for somebody who loves chocolate in Portuguese? I believe most would say “chocólatra” (chocoholic), right? Yet “chocólatra” actually means “to adore a type of octopus called choco;” Chocolate lovers should be called “chocolatólatra”! Living and learning…

Then I had to revisit my concept that Latin, though no longer taught in high school, never stopped to be part of our daily lives.

Stay tuned for the next post on Portuguese trivia!

One Google search on the web of “Bad Translations” and you will be overwhelmed by the results of bad (and hilarious) translations that you will find. I wanted to share some that I thought were very funny and some just plain embarrassing, as we can all use a good laugh now and then.

This sign, in Welsh, is supposed to tell cyclists to dismount. As you can see, it correctly says ‘CYCLISTS DISMOUNT’ in English, but the Welsh text means “BLADDER DISEASE HAS RETURNED.” Toilets must be busy there!

Check out Ethics Crisis for more of these…

In this case, officials sent the English version to be translated by a local translation company. They received a reply in Welsh stating that the person was out of the office. They appreciated the quick response and immediately sent the translated response for print. They obviously did not speak any Welsh as it was not until after the sign was in place that locals pointed out the mistake.

“I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”

The following list of translation blunders is a good example of why localization and local knowledge is important and why you should always look for a professional vendor (from Marketing Hackz)

1. When Mitsubishi launched its Pajero 4WD in Spain they had the shock of a lifetime. As they were promoting Pajero they forgot to take into account the fact that the word “pajero” means “jerk off” in some Spanish-speaking countries.

2. The famous fried Chicken hub KFC’s slogan “finger-lickin good” when marketed was translated into China as “eat your fingers off.” Ouch!

3. GEC and Plessey had a joint company in France that was called GPT. When GPT is pronounced in French, it sounds as “Jay-Pay-Tay,” which is similar to “J’ai pete,” meaning “I have farted.”

4. When Puffs tissue started marketing their products in Germany, it didn’t do so well. The reason – “puff” means “brothel” there.

5. When an Italian mineral water company promoted their product Traficante, it was a big failure because the word “traficante” means “drug dealer” in Spanish.

6. When Bacardi launched a fruit drink named Pavian they meant “French chick,” but when they promoted it in Germany, the same word meant “baboon.”

7. Electrolux had to take their slogan down which read “Nothing sucks like Electrolux.”

8. When Ford tried selling its car Pinto in Brazil, it was a huge failure. The reason – the word “pinto” is slang for small penis in the country.

9. Parker pens slogan “Avoid Embarrassment – use Quink,” when translated into Spanish came out as “Avoid Pregnancy – use Quink.”

10. When Hunt-Wesson introduced their Big John products in French Canada as “Gros Jos,” they forgot one thing: gros jos is the slang for “big breasts.”

Do you know of any similar translation blunder? Send it over so that we can also have some fun.

This week we started the festivities to celebrate Ccaps 10th anniversary!

And I could not have received better news than the one shared by Cecilia on the 50% growth we achieved in the first semester of 2009, when compared to that of last year. In 2008, we had managed to increase our revenue in 70%, yet with the so talked about and much feared crisis, I decided to keep it low key. To tell you the truth, I had meagre hopes of reaching 30% growth in 2009.

Crisis, what crisis, dude? Half year is gone and we are way ahead our expectations. And the best of all is that the optimism seems to be everywhere. Yesterday’s headline of Brazilian newspaper Valor points to reviewed growth figures for Brazilian GDP and in another story Brazil is the next place to look out.

It was worth fastening the seat belts tight, facing the adversities and risking. This video clip is for you, client, collaborator, friend or family member who believed in Ccaps and helped us create this success story:

But the celebrations have just started. Soon we will have more news for you. Stay tuned!

Hello Friends! This post is not intended to define the translator but to share my personal impression on the profession.

I have been working with Ccaps for 3 months now and I am completely fascinated by translation. Until now, I had never realized that the role of a translator is not simply decoding text and staying true to its original meaning. On second thought, it makes for an almost impossible task to perform. To transpose the true meaning of the source language into the target language requires great care in order to achieve maximum textual equivalence.

While doing some research, I discovered that in the 19^th century translation was something somewhat abstract, as we can see in the quote by Frey Luis de Leon: “He who translates should be faithful and exact, and if possible, count the words like so, no more and no less, of the same quality, condition and variety of meaning that the original has, without limitation to one’s own meaning and opinion.” Wow, pretty impersonal, don’t you think?

How fortunate that over the years we have constructed new ways to achieve the ideal translation, conceptualizing that the actual significance of the text is more than just the words themselves and are now searching to find the true intention of the author. Extra care should be given due to the evolution of words and their use in combination with a given context and cultural differences that can make varying interpretations of the same expression. If within the same language we have difficulty with neologisms and regional differences, imagine how complex it can get between two entirely different languages!

Simple words like “saudade” (a strong sense of nostalgia) that don’t have an exact correspondent in English become an immense challenge for even good translators, who need to translate the word while staying true to the meaning of the author. For me this seems to be an almost impossible task…

The perfect equivalent is something difficult to achieve, meaning that translators have many challenges ahead with the difficult task of making the impossible possible, and doing so with pleasure.

In light of these “minor” discoveries, congratulations to all of you translators for your daily magical transformation of words!