Rust Yourself To Reformist

"Aremmes" (aremmes) 04/27/2019 at 19:15 • Filed to: Engrish, translations, Bad copy writing

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Online translation tools are wonderful resources that help people to, if not perfectly, at least make a passable attempt at either understanding a message or communicating a message in another language. They’re mainly intended for study, research, and quick one-off jobs where quality does not matter. They’re definitely not intended to replace professional translation services, and definitely not intended to allow packaging designers to cheapen out on copy writing and end up making a trusted and venerable institution like Rust-Oleum look like a lazy purveyor of cheap tat to the same population that you’re trying to reach with said translation.

Take this can of rust reformer for example. The name of the product is obviously written in the indicative mood, telling us that the product reforms rust. This should’ve been translated to “reformador de oxidación”, keeping the indicative mood and the adjectival phrase in the correct grammatical position. The translation software, though, read “rust” as a verb, assumed an imperative mood, and because imperatives are always addressed to the second person, conjugated it to second person singular and then appended a reflective pronoun, ending up with “oxídese,” literally telling the reader to rust herself.

The translation of “reformer” is even worse. Here we have a verb-derived noun in the nominative case with a Latin root that takes zero effort to translate to Spanish. Instead, it got translated into the objective case, and the -er ending changed to the -ist ending, which means the same in English and Spanish.

If you do product package design, please dont skimp on translation. You'll just look stupid.

Ash78, voting early and often > Aremmes 04/27/2019 at 19:27

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Weak. I instantly read this as “Rust yourself into a Reformist” and feel like it’s a call for revolution. I’ve seen a lot of bad translations, but for a company in the industrial supply/construction  business (where a large chunk of end users are Spanish as First Language) it’s really inexcusable.

MM54 > Aremmes 04/27/2019 at 19:39

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Maybe they want you to go rust yourself?

lone_liberal > Aremmes 04/27/2019 at 19:44

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I work for a translation and localization company so I hear about things like this a lot. It’s usually when a client doesn’t understand why they should have things translated by a professional translator and not a machine. Then we hear the complaints after they come back to have it fixed.

Nick Has an Exocet > Ash78, voting early and often 04/27/2019 at 19:46

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That’s not a translation error, it’s America’s subtle invisible hand guiding the central american masses into political upheaval !

Ash78, voting early and often > Nick Has an Exocet 04/27/2019 at 19:49

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We will rattle those cages like so many ball bearings inside of spray paint cans yearning to be free!

Aremmes > Ash78, voting early and often 04/27/2019 at 19:56

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The crazy thing with this one is that the instructions on the back are translated passably well, if a bit too plain and long-winded, leading one to wonder how they made an effort to do the part that most people ignore right yet screwed the pooch so hard on the label.

Aremmes > MM54 04/27/2019 at 19:56

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I ain't gonna change my name to Rusty.

Aremmes > Ash78, voting early and often 04/27/2019 at 20:01

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Also, “oxídese” sounds like something that Dora The Explorer would say.

Aremmes > lone_liberal 04/27/2019 at 20:05

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I cannot begin to enumerate the times when “t he client doesn’t understand” has presaged a colossal fuckup.

lone_liberal > Aremmes 04/27/2019 at 20:16

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To be clear, we do offer “machine translation” as a low cost option  because the market demands it but we require the results to be edited by a translator so that things like this are caught. The clients that don’t want to pay for that are politely turned away. We do not want our company’s name attached to garbage like that.

Honeybunchesofgoats > Aremmes 04/27/2019 at 20:29

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My favorite is designers who Google Translate languages that use Arabic letters and then use them in a program that disconnects the letters and flips the direction from right-to-left to left-to-right .

Urambo Tauro > Honeybunchesofgoats 04/27/2019 at 20:47

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. skrow siht woh ton s ‘tahT

Aremmes > Honeybunchesofgoats 04/27/2019 at 20:49

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So something like “inshallah” would come out as, say, “allashin”? Oof.

Also, fun fact: the Spanish word “ojalá” comes from “inshallah” and has roughly the same meaning.