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What are some pitfalls specific to British English to avoid that a client should be aware of when translating into this language?
The pitfalls are words that exist in British English but have a different meaning in American English, such as "pavement" in AE which means “roadway” in British English.
There are a lot of differences in “old” technology terms, such as “earth” (BE) for “ground” (AE) and railcar (AE) for wagon (BE).
There are also ways of expressing oneself in BE which are not used in the United States, such as “take no notice,”, “you’re nicked!” etc., and expressions that are familiar to Americans, such as “maven,” “zit,” and “boondocks,” which are unknown in the UK.
What are characteristics of British English that are unique or different from American English and/or other languages?
In AE the shortened forms such as “don’t,” “can’t,” etc., can be used in marketing and sales literature when they are inappropriate in the UK. Hype is much more common in the United States; whenever I see the expression “We’re excited about . . .,” I find it a real turn-off. British people do not like exaggeration; it makes them feel uncomfortable and wary.
U.S. legal language, on the other hand, is much more “old-fashioned” than British English; it tends to leave out the definite and indefinite article and punctuation except for periods.
It should be noted that American punctuation differs from British punctuation. American typography uses the em dash without spaces where British typography uses an en dash with spaces on either side. Americans eschew the colon (though the British use the colon far less than Europeans). Above all, Americans use double quotation marks for speech and place periods (which the British call “full stops”) and commas inside these; the British place them outside.
When I write “British” I am actually referring to all written English in all the English-speaking countries in the world except Canada, where American punctuation is used but most of the spellings tend to be as in British English.
How do these characteristics make it important to use properly qualified, professional translators?
I constantly emphasize when giving talks on the differences between British and American English that as a translator, used to working between two languages, I can spot the differences between BE and AE and find differences in texts much more easily than someone in a different profession—even a writer or editor. The average non-editor will not even notice the differences in typography and punctuation.
There is a problem over here with certain freelance copy editors who persist in accepting work on texts prepared by American authors when they are not familiar with American style or speech patterns. It is not enough to own the right reference books such as the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style. You need to be familiar with both styles of English and have lived in both countries for a certain amount of time. Non-translators tend with time to get confused between the BE and AE styles and in the end are unable to distinguish between the right and wrong style.
Do you know examples where translation or localization mistakes have occurred with British English, such as problems with text expansion, date/time formats, counting errors, character encoding, etc., or mistakes with the translation itself? Perhaps you’ve been asked to review a translation that did not seem to be the work of a properly qualified, professional translator.
When I lived in the United States, my immigration attorney told me she was constantly having to go to court and give evidence that a document she had had translated was of a particular date because of confusion over the date being written in America with month first and then day, unlike everywhere else in the world! Of course, writing January 3 as 3/1 instead of 1/3 is a serious mistake but a very common one.
To publish any kind of household appliance manual and constantly refer to the “earth” instead of the “ground” in talking about electrical connections could lead to a product liability suit. I am aware of a lawsuit that occurred when a transformer blew up in the United States that had been manufactured in Europe, because the instruction manual had been translated in China into what the Chinese fondly believe to be English (which English, we do not know) and the instructions for attaching the surge arrestors were so poorly translated that the surge arrestors were wrongly attached and the whole device blew up, at a cost of five million dollars to the owners of the transformer.
Relate an example or two of times you found a website page or form difficult to use because it was poorly localized. How might a business lose money, prestige, or incur legal risk due to this bad translation?
Websites are not a good example in this case, as they tend to be aimed at both British and Americans (though there are some utterly awful websites translated into Babelfish English, especially by the French). I have already given examples of how the British and Americans need to be approached differently; the “hard sell” does not go down well in the UK.
When trying to market U.S. tourist accommodations to the British a lot of mistakes can be made. For one thing, “accommodation” is never written in the plural in British English, and the average Brit might assume it is a mistake. I once had to “translate” information about apartments in Florida which had an “efficiency.” Total mystery to the British! I see that on the internet apartments are still being advertised as “an efficiency”!
If possible, provide one example of a particular phrase or concept that only a properly qualified, professional translator would be able to correctly communicate.
I just gave one, “efficiency,” but there are lots of U.S. and British expressions taken from our national sports that need translating such as “pinch hitter,” “behind the eight ball,” “punt” (in the football sense), and from the British side “the run-up” (to an event such as an election; because the bowler in cricket runs up to the wicket), “sticky wicket,” “silly mid on” and “silly mid off,” “Yorkie,” “lbw,” “rain stopped play,” “nice one Cyril,” “he played a blinder,” and “the offside rule.”