MT within the editorial cross-cultural space

I’ve always been an avid reader with my favourite genres being thrillers and self development books. In the summertime, however, I tend to go for something more light-hearted like rom-com publications. And that’s exactly what I just finished reading (I know, it’s not summertime anymore but I finished reading that book while still basking in the warm September sun).

The book told the story of a British woman and an Italian man who fall in love, have a kid and move to his hometown in Italy.

The author is British and the book is written in English, but there are some dialogues in Italian. In particular there were some dialogues that jumped out at me: the ones spoken by the woman’s mother-in-law. I hear you ask why these dialogues stood out (‘cause they did, like a sore thumb and for all the wrong reasons).

It was clear to me from the get-go that the author put the lines of dialogue into Google Translate and used machine translation without consulting a localization specialist or translator. If you’re bilingual and understand both English and Italian, you’ll see what I mean just by looking at the sentences below (paraphrased, not quoted word for word):

- British woman: “Can I help you with this?

- Italian mother-in-law: "No, va bene"

The author must have typed “No, it’s alright” in Google Translate and the machine has fed them back a very literal translation of the phrase. In Italian, however, we would never respond with “No, va bene” in an interaction of this kind. We’d be more likely to say something like “Non importa, tranquilla”, “No, non ti preoccupare” or even “Tranquilla, non c’è problema”.

- British woman: “I’d like to finish what I’m doing.”

- Italian mother-in-law: "Lo farò"

This is another example of copying the words “I’ll do it” into MT and hope for the best outcome. In Italian though, we’d never say “Lo farò” in this instance, but we’d go for something like “Faccio io” or “Ci penso io”.

I’ve thought about why the Italian phrases and dialogues haven’t been localized or even checked by a language specialist and I’ve come up with a couple of reasons:

1) I’m not the target audience

2) The author and the publisher think that such simple sentences like the ones above are easy enough to leverage through machine translation

Here are my two cents on the topic.

While I may not be the intended target audience, the subject of the book is likely to attract bilingual readers who may feel that one culture matters more than the other.

The points above are clear examples that in the deeply nuanced world of editorial, even the most straightforward sentence in English may be completely misinterpreted in the target language if the communication styles of the target locale are not taken into account.