Translators should not be judges

I just received a score of 77% for a translation I completed for one of my clients. It was in the field of marketing and I do quite a bit of work for this client's client. Since marketing is one of my stronger translation subject areas, I was rather surprised to get such a low score.

Technically, 70% is "satisfactory" in this client's rating system. So 77% is not a poor score to them, but it is to me. I was expecting to find that I had somehow made spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, provided incorrect translations of terms and/or phrases, chosen words that were not in the translation memory (TM) database for the client, etc. I would have had to be completely out of my mind while doing the translation to make so many errors that my score was 77%. I am never out of my mind while translating, so you can imagine how surprised and self-disappointed I was beginning to feel.

However, the only thing I did "incorrectly" (in the reviewer's opinion) was consistently spell "Internet" with a capital "I". In this client's TM, this word appears both with an initial capital "I" and with an initial lower case "i". When there are inconsistencies in a client's TM, I usually choose the spelling/punctuation I think is most correct and consistently use that in all translations for that client. And that was it as far as "errors" in my translation. Certainly not the misspellings, mistranslations and punctuation and grammar errors I thought I had made while "out of my mind" doing this translation.

The reviewer of my translation decided on "internet" with lower case "i" and changed every instance of this in my translation. This is a personal choice based on style - not a correction of an error, especially since the TM is inconsistent regarding this term. But I don't think a personal choice to use "internet" instead of "Internet" warrants giving me a score of 70% in the "Adherence to project instructions, reference material, style guides, etc." category. In the reviewer's notes, he/she even mentioned that the TM is inconsistent regarding "Internet" vs. "internet" and that he/she "doesn't agree with this." Who would agree with having inconsistencies in a TM?

He/she also states, regarding capitalizing "Internet" or not: "General usage is capitalized but when used in a product name, it is frequently in lower case. Strange but true." Where did he/she come up with that "rule"? I have never heard of it nor have I found this to be true in any of the thousands of translations with the word "Internet" in them that I have completed. All I have found regarding "Internet" is that some clients have chosen either to capitalize the "I" or not - and translators are given this client choice in glossaries and other reference materials.

This reviewer of my translation also only gave me scores of 80% in all the other translation review categories in the score sheet. This means that even though he/she found no errors at all in the translation and therefore made no changes to it other than changing the "I" to "i" in "Internet," he/she could not find it in his/her Grinch-sized heart to give me scores higher than 80% for my translation.

This person is mean and evil and should not be a judge of other translators' work. In fact, I don't think any translators should be judges of other translators' work. But this client requires its translators to provide feedback when they review other translators' translations. So we have no choice.

When I review translations for this client, I give scores of 90% or 100% if I find absolutely no errors in each category. If I find errors, I give lower scores, based on how egregious those errors are. This means that the translations I review usually have fairly high scores. I don't consider style choices to be errors and I don't make up rules about capitalization, etc. So I would not give a lower score simply because I would have chosen another word/phrase or based on a non-existent rule.

I have received other reviews from this client that were provided by other mean translators. One in particular gave me a score of 70% in the category of "Transfer of correct source language meaning" (in other words, was everything understood and translated correctly), mainly because of stylistic preferences. To be fair, he/she noted that I had translated "hier" as "here" - the error is that this was a French to English translation and "hier" means "yesterday" in French. But"hier" means "here" in German. So this was a "leak" between the French and German parts of my brain - a first for me.

Usually, the various language sections of my brain never leak into each other. If I am translating from any of my languages (German, Spanish, French and Italian) into English, I stay in that section of my brain throughout the entire translation. But in this particular translation from French into English, "hier" looked German to me. Very unusual for me, but I am human and occasional leaks from one part of my brain to another apparently occur once in a great while.

This is probably why the reviewer also gave a possible reason for the errors I had made as "lack of knowledge of the source language." Really? Would I have been given a translation from French into English by my client if I didn't know French? Couldn't the reason possibly have been that, for a second, I saw the French word "hier" as the German word "hier" and mistranslated it? Or was this reviewer's pea-sized brain unable to consider that there are translators out there who speak/translate more than one language? And that if there are identical words in two of the five languages a translator speaks/translates, he/she might "slip" into the wrong language for a second?

I suppose I could be an evil reviewer of other translators' translations, but since I disagree with translators being judges in the first place - I think end clients/end readers should be the real judges - I don't feel that I should be mean in my reviews. I think I should point out actual errors (not style preferences) and score them based on their egregiousness. I think translators should support each other and cheer each other on - not smash each other's egos into smithereens. I choose to stay on the high road and be fair and nice in my translation reviews. We all need to work towards making the world nicer, not more evil.