Lost in Translation?

The names of the translators of books written in a foreign tongue, and critical acclaim for their work, are rarely seen on the covers or title pages of English editions published in the UK or the USA. I learnt from Jennifer Croft, a translator writing for The Guardian, that although the Man Booker International Award decided in 2016 forthwith to split the £50,000 prize between author and translator, nevertheless, not one of the six winning works of fiction published since then has the translator’s name on the front.

Translation is a highly skilled art. It calls for a deep knowledge of both languages and a sensitive ear for literary style, social context, idiom and narrative mood. Take the first page (in the original) of your favourite foreign-language novel, cut and paste it into Google Translate, and compare what Google suggests with the first page of an accredited English translation. Convinced?

Jennifer Croft translates into English from Polish, Argentine-Spanish, and Ukrainian and is perhaps best known for translating the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, mixed-genre work for which Croft and Tokarczuk won the above-mentioned prize in 2018. As she says: "Generally speaking we are also the most reliable advocates for our books, and we take better care of them than anybody else. Covers simply can’t continue to conceal who we are. It’s bad business, it doesn’t hold us accountable for our choices, and in its wilful obfuscation it is a practice that is disrespectful not only to us, but to readers as well."

The urge to correct

Scientists who analyse large amounts of data in their research often store it in Excel spreadsheets. Excel has for decades been a standard component of the suite of applications in Microsoft Office, but, despite regular upgrades, it has not lost the irritating urge to correct what it often dumbly supposes is one of your errors. Although it's not too difficult to turn off autocorrect, not everyone knows how to or can be bothered to find out. Also, in normal circumstances it can be a helpful tool, provided that you carefully read through what you thought you had written before you launch it into the public domain. (And let's be grateful that Clippy was put back in the box.)

It seems that autocorrect is a particular problem for geneticists. A gene called Membrane Associated Ring-CH-type finger 1, commonly known as MARCH1 for short, is, for instance, frequently corrected to the date March 1st. Something similar happens to genes known as SEPT1 and  DEC2 and there are many other examples both in English and other languages.

Although the problem was first noticed in 2004, it wasn't until 2016 that Mark Ziemann drew wider attention to this hazard. Then, last July he and some colleagues published a paper in the open source journal Public Library of Science (PLOS) Computational Biology entitled “Gene name errors: Lessons not learned". He and his co-authors surveyed 166,000 genomics-related papers published between 2014 and 2020, and they found that the number of papers using Excel had steadily increased and the proportion plagued with autocorrect errors still hovered around 30%. Various remedies have been proposed: a change in the official names of genes to make them less tempting targets for correction, the use of bespoke scientific software for data processing, ...  and (my naive idea) to make the Excel default "autocorrect OFF". (My thanks to The Economist of 1st September 2021 for telling me about this.)