One of the easiest and least challenging kinds of material I have ever translated in my career
as a professional translator is definitely unsophisticated questionnaire responses for a regular
client in Hong Kong (French to English), plenty of which are only a few words long and/or
not in complete sentences. Even so, it will no doubt be reassuring that, even when there are
misspellings and “txt spk” abbreviations and the like in the original language, I pretty much
always understand what is actually meant straight away. And it’s not like I can’t get help
online when I’m really stumped, from sources like these
https://www.talkinfrench.com/french-text-slang/ For example, this source tells us that the
French say “mdr” (for “mort de rire” – “dead from laughing”) where we say “lol” for
“laughing out loud”. Did you know that?
While we’re on the subject, this regular client in Hong Kong has actually also hired me not to
translate this kind of material into English, but to proofread existing English translations of
such content – with the original French to hand. Would I be correct if I suggested that you
think this sort of thing is rather too elementary for someone who has studied French and
translation at university, and been a self-employed translator for more than a decade (like
me)? I wouldn’t blame you, really. But of course, in my line of work, nothing can substitute a
review of a translation by a native speaker; I gave this client the benefit of the doubt by
presuming he thinks the same way. In such work I really have identified corrections to make I
deemed “important”.
…That said, won’t you have a look at these examples, with points that I make for each one,
including mainly information on why I changed it to what I did?
“Je n’ai pas le temps de le voir!”
Original English translation: “I have no time to see it!”
Commentary: It’s definitely not the case that this is no passable and 100% correct English
translation at least in theory. But I knew in my heart that it was my responsibility to change it
to “I don’t have the time to see it!” (or should that be “didn’t”?) You see, these are responses
provided by random people offering their views on an advert that they had been invited to
watch by professional marketers; and somehow I deduced, from nothing but these
questionnaire responses, that part of this advert (the client didn’t brief me accordingly, and
I’m still in the dark as to exactly what advert this was at the time of writing this article)
featured something with some writing on it just “passing by” on the screen in front of the
viewer’s eyes very quickly – too quickly for some to read it, it would seem.
“Vu le bon à boire”
Original English translation: “Saw the good to drink.”
Commentary: Was this one really written by a human rather than a machine translator? …In
any case, I changed this to “Saw everything worth drinking”; but to be honest, at the very
time I was writing this I started to think of that as a bad translation in its own right. My
writing this was based on my reasoning that the person knew that what they were watching
was an advert for a drink, and that, as such, this advert was trying to persuade people to buy
it, and the onus was on it to explain why it really was as worth as they would have one
believe. At the time I imagined that this person was simply hoping from the start that they
would be convinced that they had been given a reliable and honest description of this drink’s
ingredients by the end of the advert, and (in their case at least) by the end it actually
succeeded in winning them over in this regard (although exactly how much I will never

know). That was my reasoning at the time. But today, when I read “Vu le bon à boire” and
my supposedly corrected English translation of it “Saw the good to drink”, I think: “It was
likely a whole lot more subjective.” Like: at the end of it all, this person simply agreed in
their own mind that they would definitely be happy to give it a try, and/or that they
knowingly agreed that the drink in question truly was as appetising as it was made to appear
in this advert.
“At first glance, I saw nourishment and understood her us”
Commentary: Please understand that this one was already in English – yes, not all the content
in the original language of the project in question was actually in French. As you no doubt
already agree, it is not grammatically correct or anything like that; which, again, makes me
wonder how many people who preferred to give their answers in English were non-native
English speakers who employed machine translators for the job while, quite frankly, not
knowing any better. For this one there was no French original I could refer to – then again,
this particular person’s mother tongue could actually have been anything! – but my best guess
as to what they were really trying to say was “At first glance, I saw nourishment value in the
drink and quickly understood that it was meant for us” (not that I know whether “us” means
everyone or just “our kind of person” from this individual’s perspective). That’s what I put as
my correction for that entry.
“Message moins facile à voie au premier coup d’oeil”
Original English translation: “Message less easy to see at first look”
Commentary: When I read “Message moins facile à voie au premier coup d’oeil”, I think of
French natives’ embarrassing illiteracy in their own language on par with native English
speakers who write “I should of”; if you speak French you have probably already established
that “voie” should be “voir”. Still, when this got my attention I consciously chose to put it
into Google Translate – not that I actually needed it to translate it for me, of course – and it
produced “Message less easy to see at first look.” I changed “look” to “glance”, of course,
having decided straight away that the latter would be a more suitable word in this context, but
it really says something about Google Translate today that it had the sense to translate “voie”
in this particular sentence as “see” and not “way”. I guess Malinda Kathleen Reese is right in
her video about how machine translators work (titled “My real thoughts on translation”).
“Je n’ai pas bien vu”
Original English translation: “I did not see well.”
Commentary: I added two words in this case: “I did not see it too well.” This only further
supports the point that I was in fact dealing with questionnaire responses provided by people
who had seen in advert in which something passed by on the screen too quickly for them to
read the writing on it, like I said above; the client never pointed this out to me (not that I
blame him) but, again, I was able to work it out from these responses as a collective whole
alone. Ain’t that great?
“Couleur vive et facile à voir”
Original English translation: “Bright, easy-to-see color”
Commentary: I changed this to “Bright colour and easy to see” (yes, being British, I changed
American English spellings to British English ones in this project, but that’s beside the point).
For this one I would examine how Google Translate would translate “Couleur vive et facile à
voir” into English and I got… “Bright, easy-to-see color”. Literally exactly the same. But I
changed it to what I did because that is literally my job. I mean, what makes any colour “hard

to see”, anyway, if no other reason than it is particularly pale? Or if it’s amidst another colour
very similar to it?
“L’emballage est exquis et la nutrition est très complete”
Original English translation: “The packaging is exquisite and the nutrition is very complete.”
Commentary: Truthfully, I just left this one as what it was to begin with. Like all the others I
wondered if it was in any possible for me to change this one for the better some way, mainly
upon having seen “very complete”. But then I just decided that it was probably already as
good as it was going to get. Myself, I always thought that either something was “complete” or
it wasn’t. Maybe I should learn not to think in absolute terms so much.
“Rien à redire”
Original English translation: “Nothing to repeat.”
With this one, I remember Googling “Rien à redire” even though it’s easy to conclude that
what is meant by “Nothing to repeat” here is “It’s [surely] been said/done before.” No, in my
experience during this project I learnt that “Rien à redire” can mean “No complaints” (or, to
use a more common phrase, “Can’t complain”). I think I deserve points for that one.