“Traficante” is an Italian mineral water company which was welcomed by Spain’s underworld, the reason? Its name was translated directly into Spanish. And its literal Spanish meaning is “drug dealer”.

The above may sound like a joke, but it is true. Imagine the losses the mineral water company faced just because it did not ensure quality translation. What is more unfortunate is that such events are alarmingly frequent.

Inferior Italian translations happen when the translators are not qualified and/ or experienced enough. They also happen due to use of automatic translators or free translation services which translate by replacing each word in the source document with its equivalent in the target language. Say if you are getting free English to Italian translation done, the translation software would go about the process by replacing each English word in the original document with its Italian equivalent. Such Italian translations have a probability of ending in fiasco as mentioned above.

Inexperienced translators are also prone to such errors. A person who is not well versed in both the languages involved in an Italian translation would likely make literal translation and when the other language apart from Italian is significantly different from Italian then the translated version would not reflect the meaning of the original as intended.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under English to Italian translation, Free Italian Translation, Italian Translators, Italian to English Translation, Italian translation info, italian translation quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.