50 Shades Of Banana:
Translation is about more than just flipping through a dictionary (1/5)
#01 to 10 — Let’s talk about source text
It’s all in the sauce — no, source!
Seriously. Let’s look at:
This is a yellow banana.
A good translation starts with the source text. It’s our raw material, if you will. Many companies know how important it is to write good copy. Thank God. They pay copywriters or have their own marketing departments and they do a good job by giving at least some thoughts to their audience and goals. What do they want to communicate and how do they want to communicate? Naturally, a bank will avoid phrases or wordings that contain unintended puns. After all, they want to make their customers feel secure and they have to come across as serious. A tattoo studio would not want to sound like a lawyer specializing in EU law, either. So yeah, you get the point.
We want to use the above sentence to show you how a simple statement can be phrased in different ways, always with the same meaning, but with a totally different message. We’re not going to settle for reading between the lines, nope, we’re going to read between the characters!
This banana is yellow.
#01 This banana, you know, is yellow.
#02 Yellow this banana is. (Yoda calling…)
#03 This berry — botanically speaking — is yellow.
#04 This is a banana and it is yellow.
#05 This curved fruit is yellow.
#06 This is a soft-fleshed fruit that is yellow.
#07 This fruit of the largest herbaceous flowering plant is yellow.
#08 This? Yellow! Agree? Eat!
#09 First green, this is a fruit turns yellow once it is ripe.
#10 Vitamin-rich fruit, slightly more radioactive than others, and it’s yellow.
And hey, we didn’t even mess with the yellow yet!
So, that is our first ten of 50 Shades Of Banana. Tomorrow we will publish the next ten and we’ll see what happens when we work on the first ten with our friend Google.
These 50 Shades Of Banana are brought to you by Czech Your Business.
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