Tweet, tuit, tweet!

When President Trump took office in January, the Spanish version of the White House’s website vanished with the promise that it will be restored. Almost two months later, it is not back and they are “still building it.” (Here is the latest update from the LA Times  as of March 20, 2017). This underscores an important role of a translator: speediness of delivery! A professional translator would never take that long to turnaround such an important project. I sure wouldn’t!

When searching for an update, in the above-referenced article I found that the White House is directing Spanish-speakers to its Spanish Twitter account, @LaCasaBlanca. So I went to it, and there are a few issues. First, most of the tweets are retweets in English without any translation…on a Spanish-language Twitter account.

Second, most ALL of the Spanish tweets contain errors! (Sad!, to use a common exclamation of our President.) I suppose this is not a yuge surprise with all the errors contained in his English tweets. But, another important role of a translator is be accurate – this means to proofread and make sure a translation conveys its intended message AND contains no misspellings or punctuation errors. See a sampling below.

Whether you are a powerful leader or a small startup owner who needs Spanish translation, you want the face of your company to be polished and free of mistakes. If you call Ready Languages, we guarantee you will get such a product!

^”los empleo” should be “los empleos”  (This is like saying “Private sector job surged” when it should be “jobs”)

^”Le” should be “Les” because it refers to the plural “todos los ciudadanos”

^Kids should go to good schools (asistir a buenos colegios), not “go good schools” (asistir buenos colegios)

^Missing accent – it should be “médicas” here.

^Missing accent – it should be “está” here.

^Missing accent – it should be “que dé fondos” here.

^Missing space – it should be “defenderá la”