Dear my English friends. I am a Persian writer. Wrote a novel about peace in Persian language. Now a translator volunteered to translate it.He translate a page for samples. I am concerned abut result because none of us aren't an English locale. May you please read this page and talk to me your opinion? Is it suitable for publishing in English? The translation must be literal and fluent. Thank you for your help. The sample page: His eyes had a deep silence and stunned sadness in the dark and light at the end of the saloon. The blinding thunderbolts which continually touched is face created a trembling flow on his skin to the waist. Some strange like camphor smells from the chairs, leather mixed whit the unknown people’s perfumes who were whispering and looking at him. He was fascinated by the heavy moment because of the unavoidable illusion of the place even the iron wristband with the red trace on his skin which attached him to a man with a black coat. The saloon was small. Less than 200 scientists and researchers were sitting on the chairs, but the journalist’s crowd had no precedence. Everybody stared at the unknown man how had become named as ‘stranger of Longyearbyen ’ and was sitting under flashes near the policeman in the last row. The head of the anthropology department of Harvard mounted the rostrum and welcomed the scientists who had accepted his invitation. He talked about a man had been an illegal immigrant and was suspected as a terrorist. Then he mentioned his young colleague, Alex Deville, s curiosity who discovered new complexities in the case and made the anthropology department to inform the scientists in this session and create some opportunity to meet the strange man of Longyearbyen and invite them to join the research team which should be formed in a C. Clarke research organization. Alex Deville mounted the scene while the attendants were clapping. He put his notes on the rostrum, took a fresh breath and said, “ Dear ladies and gentlemen, scientists and researchers. I have the honor to announce the primary results of the researches concerning the man who is named as “Longierbien stranger”. Of course, such data not only do not reply our questions about his real identity, but also propose many more questions. Fortunately the police of Norway agreed with delivering the suspicious notes with him to C. Clarke organization. They recognized them as encoded writings by a terrorist group. We request him to read some sentences of the notes whit his unknown language. His voice was analysed by advanced software of linguistics. The words were so varied that we estimated his speech language included more than 600,000 words. Now the question is proposed if it is possible a terrorist group creates such advanced language only to hide their data?
it's not wonderful, I wouldn't pay this guy if he's offering a perfect service. In fact I wouldn't pay this guy at all. If you're handing over your hard earned, you want to make sure it 100% correct and this is far from it, lots of typos and in some case wrong word choices.
I only read the first paragraph and I gotta say, I didn't understand some of it. There're also some spelling mistakes. I've included my thoughts and corrections below - red text is a highlight of your text, blue text is my opinion: All in all... I would not go with this translator My key problem, even more than his clumsy use of phrases and words, is that the sentence construction simply doesn't make sense, often.
I am a professional translator for the USDOJ, federally certified. This translation is very poor. It is easy to see where the idiomatic dynamics of the source language syntax are being wedged into English syntax. But, you mention in your original post that the translation must be "literal and fluent". This is a problematic description of the end product that is being requested. Do you mean literary as opposed to literal? If a translator is told to do a "literal" translation, this is the kind of instruction given for legal projects where there is next to no leeway in the translation. This would seem to be a creative work. Literal is a bad instruction to give to the translator. Clearly the work needs to be faithful to the original in intent, but for creative work, often wording must be altered, shifted, moved, and simply replaced. Such is the nature of this kind of work. I have done creative projects like this in the past and I make it a policy to work very closely with the client to ensure that the meaning is transmitted correctly.
Thank you very much All of your points are very useful for me. I changed my decision. I will look for a local translator. Sincerely
Just chiming in to agree that the translation is very bad. It's so bad that I originally though that it might be an automated translation; after re-reading it there are some sentences that are close enough to correct that that that seems unlikely. But it's definitely not fluent.
