I don't care for alphabet soup

Nothing says to stakeholders "Go away and don't bother us" like a business report full of arcane internal acronyms that only few company insiders understand.

That acronym-itis has become really bad over the last ten years or so. It is hard to find any company report or document that does not make excessive use of such "code language" – even if it is intended for an external target group of readers.

While most people probably don't care (they'll just skip over anything they don't understand), translators are the ones that suffer the most, because they are expected to make heads or tail of these acronyms and find a suitable "translation" in the target language.

Today I received a job from one of my regular agency clients (a PowerPoint file – they are the worst cases of acronym-itis), but the client, as always, has failed to supply the agency, and me, with a glossary of all those secret codes.

So I informed the agency that I would leave all acronyms as-is, because I am a translator and not a professional crossword-puzzle solver.

Most companies, apparently, are not interested in communicating with the outside world; hence, their secret language. Unless they provide us, their translators, with a decoding key, we shouldn't be expected to spend hours trying to crack DaVinci's Code.

I suggest that all translators should take this approach. Do not translate acronyms and other unfathomable abbreviations (except common ones, of course, that anyone could be expected to know) unless the client provides a detailed glossary.

Perhaps, they will catch on once they're stuck with vital business documents parts of which don't make sense at all in the translation.

Comments

[Judy Jenner]

Ganz deiner Meinung, Werner. I completely agree that only acronyms that are commonly used by the general public are the ones that translators should be expected to translate. After all, every company has its own quirky acronyms and abbreviations that are undecipherable to anyone but a company insider. For example, at a company I worked here in Las Vegas, we had a content management system called RCM, named after the in-house software developer who wrote the thing.

I think that many times, as translators, we feel so compelled to know everything that we go to great lengths to find answers that can't be found (for instance, my RCM example above). As a recent escapee from the corporate world and now working for direct clients, I am still training myself to say "No, I am not familiar with your internal acronyms. Can you please define them for me?" instead of fruitlessly searching for answers for hours. If all translators went with your approach, we'd save a lot of wasted time.

[Werner Patels]

It would, indeed, be nice if we knew everything, but we don't. The issue I address in this post also relates to the lack of respect clients have for translators. They would never treat lawyers or accountants this shabbily.

[Nadine Touzet]

Hi Werner, good post, as always. You know, I'm not sure clients mean to be disrespectful to us. They are so used to gliding over those acronyms that they don't stop to think. It's our responsibility to raise the flag and ask for that information. I was at a company meeting recently, people from all over the world; they all used in-house acronyms (French) and we interpreters just pronounced them 'à l'anglaise'.

[Kevin Lossner]

Amen!!! For years I wasted enormous amounts of time trying to decipher such arcana, but although it is always gratifying to solve such puzzles, it is a completely unproductive use of time. I now simply write up a list of unusual acronyms and submit it to the client for clarification, and if such is not forthcoming, I wash my hands of the problem. I don't think it's a matter of deliberate disrespect on the part of clients - I think they are just too caught up in their own little worlds to realize how incomprehensible they are. I remember years ago hearing German colleagues in a software company talk about "mama". It quickly became apparent that the discussion probably wasn't about their mothers, but it really wasn't clear what they were talking about. Finally I asked - the full term was Mappenmanager (a module in their software suite referred to in English as the file manager). Unfortunately, their support personnel were making entries in the English support database referring to "Mama", which I'm sure their customers abroad found interesting.