I’m a translator. It’s actually quite a strange thing to write for me, because this state of fact kind of crept up on me over the last few years. But professionally, that’s what I am now. Officially.
It’s also presidential election time in France. 10 days to the 2nd round. Nicolas Sarkozy the conservative against Ségolène Royal the socialist.
For the first time in last Sunday’s 1st round vote, France experimented with electronic voting machines in some districts. It was a disaster. Most people over 65 couldn’t use them (too complicated, too hard to read). And overall, they turned out to be very inefficient and slower than manual voting, causing huge lines of disgruntled voters (check out this report in English).
There had been controversy about their use. Could they be trusted? Could they be manipulated? Hacked? (Answer: yes).
But as usual, nobody considered translation and basic ergonomics. Most of these machines are American or Dutch, and the software and ergonomics of the US machines turned out to be more than problematic (see this site, in French) :
- Poor translation and translation-related bugs: translated text that overflows beyond the screen area, literal translations (« Resume » translated by « Résumé » as in « Synopsis »), missing or wrong accented letters (Can you spell Sgolne?), non printing accented characters…
-
Poor ergonomics: Tiny text. The interface mentions a round green button (it’s a diamond). To vote, you have to press on a big RED button at the TOP of the screen, instead on the aforementioned GREEN button at the BOTTOM of the screen. DUH!!!
And how about this: Every day, the evening newscast of the France 2 public TV station is subtitled into English for the US market (???). Yesterday, whoever was doing the translation let his incompetence, subconscious or anti-Sarkozy political opinions appear on screen.
Sarkozy was saying: « I invite all of the people of France (…) to rally around me ».
The translator wrote: « (…) to rally my inflated ego ».