Okay: everybody will agree that translating demands creativity from time to time.
But sometimes…
A few years ago I got a French to Dutch translation, mainly about… shoes. Sport shoes, that is.
It was filled to the brim with words I didn’t find in any dictionnaries, not in my new cd-rom dictionnaries, not in my older paper dictionnaries, and not in web dictionnaires. I didn’t even find them anywhere on the internet!
But then it occured to me that the text was mostly describing American brands.
So, I thought, could it be that… ?
And, yes: using my everyday English dictionnary I discovered there had been an English-French translator at work, who simplied replaced the English suffixes with French suffixes, thinking that was sufficient to come up with genuine French words!
Do you also recall odd ways to make a translation?