Lost in Translation

I feel I should, after my last blog entry, redress the balance a little bit, and ‘fess up to my own linguistic howlers. I’m sure there have been many, but one, in particular, still haunts me. It took place over 20 years ago, but to this day I get all clammy and embarrassed just thinking about it.

Here’s what happened…..

I was home on maternity leave after the birth of son#2, and enjoying a bit of a respite from work. At the time, I was working as an export sales manager for a company which made food additives.  One of my most important markets was Algeria, and whilst I was on leave, the State Monopoly with whom I had most of my dealings asked our company to send some representatives to speak at a conference. As this was going to be conducted in French and many of my technical colleagues didn’t speak the language, I was drafted back in from maternity leave to do the simultaneous translation at the conference.

On the day, it all went rather well. After the presentations there was a Q&A session, and I was busy translating back and forth, with a steady stream of questions from the very attentive audience of about 200 Algerian food scientists and manufacturers. 

In the evening, we all went off to a local restaurant for a meal, happy and relaxed that it had all gone off so well.  Or so I thought.

Our local agent, a Frenchman, was sitting next to me at dinner, and suddenly said to me as we were chatting about the day: “By the way, you DO realise what you said this morning, don’t you?”. There was a look in his eye that said that he knew I didn’t and that he was going to enjoy telling me.  Which, indeed, he did. Far too much, if you ask me. Sparing no detail, this is what I’d done..

The products we were selling in Algeria were mainly dyes for foodstuffs. When sold, these are in powder form and highly concentrated; so much so that they have to be diluted before being added to the product. Normally, in order the achieve the right dilution and to ensure that the colour of the finished product can be controlled, the dyes are made up into a solution, and it is this solution which is added to the product. During the Q&A, someone had said that they were experiencing problems with the solutions “going off” if they were kept for any length of time, and asked for advice. Our chief chemist, who was among the presenters, offered to answer, and I translated her reply for the audience. So far, so good. The answer was reasonably simple. There are lots of available preservatives on the market which, when added to the solutions, will keep them stable. Which is what I passed on in my translation. Or so I thought.

Some six hours after the event, and with great pleasure at my discomfort, the local agent explained to me that I’d obviously got a bit tangled in translating, and told a roomful of Algerians to stick a “préservatif” in their dye solutions.

Unfortunately, dear readers, for those of you not familiar with the French language, “préservatif” happens to be the French word for “condom” and "conservateur" was the word I was looking for. I knew that. I did. Honest......