Politics and Translation

Nothing so frays the tweed, so to speak, of my political convictions as the gratuitous or foolish spending of public funds. Waste feeds the rhetoric of those opposed to the state's corrective role in a free society, as a supplement to the market. For a generation, the epithet "tax and spend" has been used as though it meant tax and waste. Waste taints any policy, however commendable.

Public commemoration of the second Spanish republic, the 1931-1939 Generalitat, the political opposition to Franco and the agents of change during the transition to democracy is such a policy: whether or not it's right for the Catalan authorities to pursue such an objective, or pursue it in the manner in which it is being pursued, there is waste in the programme's budget, though waste most Catalans will never notice.

The waste accompanies an exhibition of very large format photographs of public places, placed in the places they portray. The photographs were taken in Barcelona between 1936 and 1978; they record moments in the political life of the city. Each photographs is accompanied by eight texts: a general introduction to the exhibition (in Catalan, Spanish, English, and French) and a note on the photograph itself (in the same four languages). Here is the introduction, in Catalan:

And in English:

The translation is poor, but not awful. Now take a look at some of the notes appearing alongside the photographs themselves:

This is so badly garbled that the sense is lost.

Eleven of the twelve photographs have been placed where foreign visitors are most likely to see them: in three central squares, and on a main shopping street. To the visitor with a good command of English, the campaign--and with it, both Catalonia as a polity and as a society (a public campaign is not perceived as a one-off, like a restaurant menu)--conveys either a lack of English language skills, or a lack of concern with the quality of the translations. The translators, who should not be blamed for accepting work while the Spanish economy contracts, are young translation graduates, but not native speakers. The graphic designer, however, is from Liverpool. If he saw the translations, he might have corrected them, or alerted those who had commissioned them that the English texts were sub-standard. Executive responsibility for the exhibition lies with Ricard Martinez, a Barcelona alderman for ERC. If Mr Martinez curates any more exhibitions, he should either save the public money by not commissioning translations, or see to it that the quality of translations is taken as seriously as graphic design.