Richard Benham May 14, 2006:

to spell "Human Resources" with capitals. And "managers" for "Führungskräfte" is, of course, far too general: FK are upper-level managers or, yes, "executives". OTOH, if we spoke a less popular language, we might have less work....

Richard Benham May 14, 2006:

In this case, the guy got a native speaker (non-translator) to translate random paragraphs, and concluded from the fact that the two versions were not word-for-word identical that I wasn't a native. This person had obviously been in Germany too long, ...

Non-ProZ.com May 14, 2006:

Been there done that Unfortunately, it seems that such cases are a rather frequent occurrence for us English natives (many of my colleagues have also reported such experiences). I have clients complain about my translations, merely for it to transpire that they were non-natives and their complaints were based on the fact that they thought a year in England qualified them to teach me how to do my job. Often clients would question words simply because they weren't familiar with them and I was seriously tempted to just tell them to use a bloody dictionary!

Richard Benham May 14, 2006:

...my already having to translate "Beobachtung" and "Monitoring" as "monitoring". I later noticed that none of these gross errors had stopped him from using my translation verbatim in his website; so I demanded and got payment.

Richard Benham May 14, 2006:

I had a client refuse payment once because of all my "mistakes" like "personnel" instead of "Human Resources" (with the capitals), "executives" instead of "managers", "keeping an eye on" insstead of "monitoring" for "im Auge halten", and this despite...

Sarah Downing (asker) May 14, 2006:

I know. How many times have I had a German customer try and tell me how to write. Sometimes I wish we spoke a less prominent language so there wouldn't be so many bloody know-it-alls butting in and attempting to tell us how to do our bloody job!:-)

Richard Benham May 14, 2006:

Yeah, it's trendy to be able to speak English, but that doesn't mean you actually have to bother to learn it!

Sarah Downing (asker) May 14, 2006:

Denglisch! Tell me about it. I spent this morning proofreading part 1 of this job from hell - unfortunately, a non-native had attempted a very poor translation, so some sentences were completely unintelligible. I hate the way Germans so often use English words in the German that don't actually make any sense to us natives - urrggh!

Richard Benham May 13, 2006:

Why is it that the hardest part of translating German to English is always the bits that already are in English?