I agree that they don't Adrian. But if they relied solely on translation software, it would be a hundred times worse!
The problem is this: Although there are no such laws in place, as a translator you should - strictly speaking - translate professionally only into your mother tongue. Because no matter how proficient or fluent you are in a foreign language, you will never be quite as proficient and fluent as you will be in the language you have spoken since birth. There will always be certain subtleties and nuances missing here and there.
However this doesn't stop people offering their services as translators into foreign languages (more of often than not, these people are not as good or as proficient as they think they are), nor does it mean that all companies bother to seek out professionally-trained native speakers to translate their literature.
Usually it's a cost issue (good translators and interpreters don't come cheap) and/or a question of convenience, so they will just find someone in-house with a "good to passable" knowledge of English as a foreign language, get them to translate it and make do with that, warts and all.
The end effect of this is that they end up with a translation that can be anything from "generally good but with some amusing errors" to "complete rubbish". And I suspect that this is the case with the modelling publications from Andrea and others, many of which have quite clearly not been translated out of Spanish (or whatever the original source language) by native speakers of the respective target language(s).
I see it all the time in my working life. I've lost count of the times I 've been asked to re-translate material that had previously been badly translated in the way I've described above (or worse still, by something like Google Translator) because some company had tried to cut corners by having it translated by one of their staff who studied English at school or university, and who goes to New York every year on a shopping trip (and therefore "speaks English").
A real bone of contention in the language services industry is that unlike in some professions (law, medicine, architecture for example) where there are strict laws and codes of practice etc. governing who can set themselves up as a doctor, a lawyer or an architect, these don't exist in our trade. The result: In theory a monkey with a dictionary can call himself a "translator" or an "interpreter". This has led to a proliferation of cowboys, charlatans and snake-oil sellers within our industry, and this can sometimes be a problem for those of us who are professionally trained and qualified translators or interpreters with many years of experience and who know what it takes to do a proper job.
Best wishes to your daughter in her chosen career. I admire anyone who masters an oriental foreign language.
- Steve
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