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What To Do With Corporate Jargon?
When translating business and marketing material into English, corporate jargon is almost always part of the text and is often an issue for a translator. Most dictionaries and guides tell you that you should not use any kind of jargon when translating, but real-life business English still does.
What is corporate jargon?
You say ‘potato’, I say ‘pope’
Barely a couple of minutes after the new Pope Francis got selected, Facebook’s newsfeed was invaded by multiple news articles, pictures, posts and memes accompanied by the Latin line “Habemus Papam” (“We have a Pope), or “Tenemos Papa” in its Spanish equivalent. What if I told you that, “tenemos papa” could also mean “we have potato”?
So let’s imagine you are a Spanish speaker who has been so absorbed by the busyness of life that you have not kept up with the latest news at all; one day you have a moment to reconnect with the world, check Facebook and then you see a friend’s post reading “tenemos papa”. You might have thought your friend was perhaps sharing his or her excitement with the virtual community about their home-grown potatoes and probably dropped the –s for plural (let’s face it, you can’t trust Facebook when it comes to proper spelling) in an attempt to quickly make their achievement public knowledge before the glory could be taken away from them. Luckily enough, context is there to help you when you realize multiple individuals post the same comment with images of the Vatican. It couldn’t possibly be that there was a new potato growing surge among your circle of friends, so good thing you didn’t make that silly comment about how much you love them “fried”.
Today’s Special Translation of the Day: “One mug of bleeding if you buy a Little Joseph of Veal”
Some of the jokes and pranks I remember the most from all the ones flying around the Internet, happen to be the ones I received in e-mails when I first set up an account. Whether I remember them because it was my first experience with the World Wide Web or because those were genuinely funny, they seemed to have gotten fossilized in my memory and made an impression forever.
One such e-mail was a copy I received of a menu from a Galician restaurant in northern Spain that had gone through a translation attempt. It seemed more of a description of a movie night party (“Wines from the River Ha and the Valley of Rocks”) with suspicious dishes straight out of a nightmare (“One mug of bleeding”) and to top it all, in company of an oddly eclectic audience (“Female Jews with Thief”).
Your Individual Language
For each country there is at least one official language, the ‘lingua franca’, defined as the ‘official’ language. This is the language we teach our children and the language we learn at school.