Submitted by Peter Schmolka on September 2, 2019, at 16:54
I am a retired translator and supported an environmental group, which I will not name to protect their privacy and possibly reputation. They wanted to approach Francophones in French and so started sending out material bilingually, but the French was poorly done and amateurish. I told them about it on several occasions, but they continued to make these bad mistakes. It was so annoying that I stopped my monthly support, although I still donate to them from time to time. I'll give two examples. They talked about a park summit, meaning a meeting to consider parks and green spaces. This was mistranslated as a meeting in a park, certainly not what was intended! On another occasion, the translator took "town hall" literally to mean city hall, instead of a public meeting that could be anywhere, not necessarily city hall. In this case, the meeting was not held in city hall. As translators well know, we do not just translate words: we translate ideas and meaning in context.