Muphry's law strikes again!
A week ago I received some customer feedback about some translations I had done from Croatian into English. The customer was not happy with some of the wording I used so they decided that they will provide 'corrections'.
As every translator has experienced, what was provided as 'corrections' was a literal, word-for-word translation of the original text, complete with English spelling, punctuation and capitalisation mistakes, and the inevitable basic grammar errors that come from such an unprofessional approach to translation. In other words, it was a complete mess.
What can I say? Yet another case of Muphry's law.
Muphry's law? Don't I mean 'Murphy's law'?
Well, sort of.
Muphry's law is an adage that states: if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written. The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy's law.
When I'm revising other people's translations, one of my main concerns is that I be consistent and know what I'm doing so as to avoid any hypocrisy. That means if I correct something, I better have dotted my i's and crossed my t's. Doing otherwise makes you look like a fool. You don't want to be the person who, to use the oh-so crude Aussie saying, appears to 'not know their shit from clay'.
There are some other variations of Muphry's law:
* Umhöfer's rule: articles on writing are themselves badly written
* Skitt's law: any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself
* Hartman's law of prescriptivist retaliation: any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror [sic]
* The iron law of nitpicking: you are never more likely to make a grammatical error than when correcting someone else's grammar. Coined by the blogger Zeno
* McKean's law: any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling or typographical error
OK, now having written all this, I better make sure that I go through this post with a fine-tooth comb. I don't want to have committed Muphry's law unintentionally. We've all been there!
.%20A%20day%20of%20campaigning%20%E2%99%80%20%E2%80%A6%20or%20a%20day%20to%20buy%20flowers%20%F0%9F%92%90.jpg)
