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Janice Gelb reports: <<We heard for years that contractions were hard
to translate. We finally officially asked the liaison with our
localizatation department to verify this commonly held belief. We felt
that any translator who couldn't translate common contractions wasn't
worth the money we were paying them.>>
That's always been my experience, having both worked as a translator
and worked with translators. Anyone who doesn't understand contractions
or other characteristics of a language shouldn't be working as a
translator. Period. I suspect the "don't use contractions" message is
one of those urban myths that got started way back when and has been
accepted into the profession as dogma.
Are the contractions appropriate for readers with English as their
second language? That's a very different situation indeed. Although
some readers will be able to handle them, some won't, so it's wise to
err on the side of caution if you're not going to translate your text.
But even then, the problem is not with contractions per se, but rather
with sloppy and overly idiomatic use of contractions--these can confuse
English readers too. If you've had a good editor review your work
before you send it for translation*, this should never be a problem.
* And if you haven't had an editor review your work before translation,
you're probably wasting your money and asking for errors. I suspect
that asking that editor to edit for clarity will repay the editing cost
if you pay by the hour (rare these days) and if you ask the editor to
make a document concise, may even repay the editing cost if you're
paying for translation by the word. Some day I'll actually collect some
statistics on this from my own translations, but given that I've
routinely been asked to shorten a text by 20 to 50% before translation,
the numbers certainly seem favorable.
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