The Gallery of Wrongness – Page 2 (Milano è Turismo/Milan Tourist Portal)

“Milano è Turismo”/The Site of the City of Milan’s Convention and Visitors Bureau ⁞ Report card: C ⁞ For crying out loud. This is the official site of Italy’s (arguably) most cosmopolitan city and (purportedly) its wealthiest. The Comune di Milano spent quite a few (thousand) euros to get this snazzy (not to say ostentatious and tarted-up) site online. You’d think they could have done a little better with the translation.

Instead, this is a good example of how not to translate a large site. As you work through the multiple pages and embedded links, you immediately notice vast differences in the quality of the English. What that suggests is that the Comune of Milan did what everyone does: used multiple translators with varying levels of skill (from “quite good” to “stop me before I translate again!”), including non-native-English speakers.

Why use multiple translators? Because the translation of institutional sites like this one is always left for the last minute. When someone remembers that there’s still the translation to think about, it isn’t humanly possible for a single translator to get the job done. (Mind you, the worthies who wrote the content in Italian took their time; the translators were the ones who had to contend with impossible deadlines.)

Among my favorite boners and flubs on this site are the links to “Passionateness” and “Amusement,” the “aspects” that “have arranged to meet up to release a desire to evolve” (Run for your lives! They’re alive!); the description of Milan as “like a mosaic of ten tiles” (not much of a mosaic, is it, with only ten tiles); and the information that “The nature is dotted by inhabited centres” where “you can also taste the produce of the culinary and wine tradition.”

But what really makes this site a miracle of mediocrity is its exhausting, stultifying, low-fiber, vapid, jargon-ridden ad-speak emptiness — characteristic, frankly, of the vast majority of tourist websites in Italy, but unforgivable in the case of a city like Milan and a bells-and-whistles effort like this one.

A few examples:

“A metropolis is always a location for innovation and creativity, and so it will inevitably be in the forefront as regards experiments in contemporary living and in heralding the arrival of the future.” Translation: Milan is just so darn cool.

“The Milanese institutes train professionals in various disciplines and numerous specialist schools also offer a post-university qualification.” Translation: We have an educational system. (Remarkably like every other large city in the world, actually.)

“For Milan, Europe is the city’s natural domestic dimension, while the world is its constant arena of relations.” Translation: something about Europe.

and finally: “The Municipality of Milan, according to the principle of subsidiarity, favours associations and individuals that contribute and offers itself as a point of reference for societies that wish to make a commitment to donating to charity.” Translation: I have no idea, but I can confirm that “subsidiarity” is a new low in calque-translation.

The Gallery of Wrongness

: English Abused Here! :

The “Hall of Shame” is an idiosyncratic listing of “translated” web sites in which English is beaten viciously about the head and shoulders. In almost every case (and, surely, it’s no more than a coincidence), the “translators” have forgotten to sign their work.

(1) Education Bookcost.net ⁞ Report Card: F- ⁞ This site’s most incomprehensible feature is not the mess it makes of English, but the fact that someone continues to post stories there. Virtually all of them reference events in the English-speaking world, which means the site’s authors could simply have mirrored or republished stories from English-language sources. Instead, they chose to “translate” them from an unknown language into the unknown language used on Bookcost.net. If the logic escapes you as well, drop the mysteriously anonymous bloggers a line at service@bookcost.net or news@bookcost.net. [See screen captures here and a shocking revelation by an international soccer star here.

(2) Tuscany-Charming ⁞ Report Card: F ⁞ For the last several years, Tuscany-Charming has always been good for a laugh. One of my favorite "Inglisc" translations is their description of the "Coast of the Etruscans," where "it is happened that the erosion of the wind has had resulted everything anything else other than homogeneous." That's practically poetry.

(3) Arma dei Carabinieri/Italian Ministry of Defense ⁞ Report Card: C- | Here's a good example of a site that probably didn't need to be translated in the first place. Even if a compelling reason existed for the site to be available in English (as well as French, Spanish, and German), this translation is more embarrassing than illuminating. Still, perhaps someone may find it useful to read that "This organization is made up of departments dedicated to highly specialized tasks which are handled either in order of priority or exclusively as a support function for the territorial organization and reports to Carabinieri Specialist Mobile Unit Command "Palidoro" which is based in Rome and divided into (1) Mobile Unit Division located in Rome on whom the following entities depend...." [Zzzzzzz.]

(4) Beppe Grillo ⁞ Report Card: C- ⁞ Beppe Grillo is a muckraker, comedian, writer, and general thorn in the side of the Italian political caste. He’s Italy’s answer to Michael Moore, and I adore him. But his English-language site is disgraceful. True, translating Beppe’s irony, sarcasm, and sardonic humor would be a challenge for the best translator, but Grillo isn’t using the best translators. He’s also quite clearly not using native English speakers. If he chooses to let Italian students practice their English on his blog for (I devoutly hope) free, I suppose that’s his business. I can’t help but be convinced, though, that Grillo is shooting himself in the foot by allowing prose like this (116 words in a single, incomprehensible sentence) to appear on his site: “But there are not just those “ad aziendam” mess-ups, there are also “ad personam” mess-ups for Berlusconi and his friends, who have had the opportunity to avoid the most severe of the penalties not only thanks to the laws that Berlusconi and his friends did for themselves during his three periods in government, but everyone forgets the laws that the Centre Left did in favour of Berlusconi, when the Centre Left did a favour for the caste, but above all a favour for Berlusconi, when the Centre Left was in government and had the Majority, that was between 1996, rather that is between 1995 with the Dini government and 2001 and then between 2006 and 2008.”