How we searched for a translator in the section "Songs"

All songs are sung today. Simple and complex, funny and sad, but without a full-time translator, we don’t have time to translate all the hot news to the “Songs” section on our website. We decided to look for it on “he he ru” (this is how they call themselves in their advertising). As a test, we took the composition Written in the Sand from Old Dominion. 361 applicants readily translated the first three verses given to them. Thousands of vacancy views determined a keen interest in her.



When I looked through the completed tasks, I was terribly interested in what people had been doing all these years, indicated as work experience. More than 70% could not translate even the first line correctly. It sounds like this:

Turn me on, turn me off, then you turn me back on the weekend
You turn me on, you quench my ardor, then you turn me on again to the weekend

She conveys the mood of the whole song. The author describes his hesitant relationship with a girl. Is he wondering if this feeling is fleeting or eternal love? The song is pretty simple. There are no complex expressions or references in it. Many job seekers translated this line like this:

Turn me on, turn me off, then you turn me back on the weekend
Turn me on, turn me off, then turn me off at the weekend

The narrative takes an imperative mood. The phrase sounds like it was driven through a Google translator, but oh well. Why turn it off twice in a row? Someone clearly does not understand the meaning of the phrasal verb “to turn back on” . If “to turn back” means “to wrap”, “turn”, then “to turn back on” without a doubt means “turn back on”.

A couple more bad options:

you turn me on to saturday
you drive me to the weekend

A good music producer needs to hear the first 10 seconds of the track in order to feel whether he will become a hit and whether it is worth spending time and listening to it further. Similarly, it becomes clear from the first line whether a person is able to translate (we called it “sifting by the first line” - ed. ). Among the applicants were those who decided that beautiful words should be added to an understandable translation for educational purposes. About 10% of candidates inserted a glass into a hand, somewhere they poured a wave of the sea. It looked like this:

you flirt when you're drinkin '
you flirt with a glass in your hand

or are we written in the sand?
or will we be washed away in a wave in the sand?

The song has this line:

Then they disappear
I see these emerging bubbles, as if you are writing, then they disappear

The author has in mind the dots that we see when we write a message in some kind of messenger. When a person stops writing, they disappear. For some reason, many people had problems with this line. Someone remembered that the messages themselves called bubbles, someone decided to call text messages at all. But SMS or come or not. The feeling of the desire to write appears and disappears.
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Here is a bad translation option:

I see those bubbles
Your words appear and disappear like SMS bubbles

This candidate did not even notice that instead of “you” stands “your” is a ridiculous mistake for six years of work experience. I am ashamed to ask for such a job.

We deliberately gave the text with errors, we even changed the word “forty” to “fourteen” in the song to find out if the applicants checked the validity of the lines. 40% did not. A good translator should be convinced of the originality of the text. After all, you can often find the words that someone wrote at the hearing, making mistakes. Translate them meaningless.

Funny fact: 95% of applicants were applicants.

The main task of the translator is to convey the meaning. No matter what words. But if this translation is intended for educational purposes, then it should be as close as possible to the original. Save unnecessary words for explanation. Why confuse a newbie who can read this? I hardly dug out 7 really good works, albeit with a few flaws.

So, summing up:

• 11,000 job views;
• 361 responses;
• only about 30% translated the first line correctly;
• 7 candidates coped with the task well;
• 1 got a job.

If you want to listen to songs all day long and translate them, so much so that they pay for it, then you should do it well. Understanding all these phrasal verbs is not difficult, because in most songs they sing about love and parting.

Any company is a people. And to get into a good team, you need to approach self-development responsibly. Be the best version of yourself.

Oleg Vegan, author of the project “pesnyaspeta” on Puzzle English