When English is not English

I have spent a bit of time over the past few days translating a Swedish technical report into English for another one of our offices in Sweden. It was reasonably straight forward but I did get hung up a few times. Strangely enough the problem was not from my end with the translating, but with the very poorly written Swedish report. When you're trying to translate from a second language to a first language, it's a real hassle if the original report is full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. I spent quite some time trying to find Swedish words I didn't know, only to find that the words didn't exist. Or trying to unravel an ambiguous sentence so that the correct meaning could be conveyed in English. In New Zealand, I was a big fan of using Plain English. No, for the unaware, that doesn't simply mean writing correctly. It's a particular style of writing with its own official set of rules, which has become more commonplace in English workplaces today. It is essentially the direct opposite of most Swedish text I have read. The concept is painfully simple. The aim is to convey a message clearly to a person who knows nothing about the topic. The basis for the change is that the more you write, the greater the risk is for confusion or misunderstanding. I agree entirely with that. The solution is to choose words and sentence structures very carefully, using as few words as possible to convey the clearest possible message. Less is more (says he writing screeds of rambling blog posts). The English legal and government systems have completely embraced the Plain English concept, primarily from a practical standpoint. These two industries are collectively the largest producers of printed paper. Switching to Plain English writing has saved them significant amounts of money in paper volume and document storage. Most Swedes are still hanging with the old outdated English writing style where it's all about volume. It's as obvious as hell when you know the difference. The more adjectives you use, and the longer you can make the sentence, the more people will be impressed. That works perfectly fine between Swedes, but it has completely the opposite effect when read by a native English speaker today. When I read Swedish technical text, I get this gnawing feeling that the author isn't 100% confident about what they are writing and are trying to cover for their lack of confidence through sheer volume of text. The more they try to convince me, the less convinced I become.

This left me with a bit of a dilemma when completing the translation work. Simply translating to English, even changing the grammar around to follow a more natural English pattern, wasn't going to take away the concerns that the report would generate when read by a native English speaker. That's another tool with Plain English, identifying the recipient before writing. While it was now technically English correct, it was painfully obvious that the report wasn't prepared by a native English speaker. It was clearly destined for an English speaking audience, and would just not flow right. In the same way that I'll never match the native flow of Swedish spoken by native Swedes, a native Swede will never be able to write in English in the same style as a native English speaker. No matter how good their language skill level. My Swedish wife, despite being extremely gifted in English, struggled with this quite a lot in New Zealand, taking 10 pages to say something that only required 2 and doubling the confusion factor in the process. She did recognise it however, and I was often given draft copies to carry out a "slash and burn" review of. As far as my latest translation task went, I did shorten up as many sentences as possible along the way in order to clarify the message. I figured that if their English was so poor that they couldn't carry out the translation work themselves then they also wouldn't spot that I had Englishised the text along the way. I did draw the line fairly early on as I figured that the original author needed to take some responsibility as well.

Apart from this site, I don't write very often in English these days. Aside from the odd family email. Translating that report should have been second nature for me, I've been writing technical and legal documents for 20 years. But it was quite tiring, mentally. These days, while I still remember most of the words, the grammatical side has become slightly clouded. Swedish grammar and sentence structure rules feel the natural way for me today. Even after I've written something in English which I know to be correct, it just reads wrong to me. It wouldn't be a huge deal working again in an English speaking country, but I'd be very aware that the subtle using of English would probably be down at a level that I wouldn't accept professionally from others. So I guess that I'm stuck here.