Disagreements, Mistakes, etc.

John loves a certain musical style; Jane hates it. This is subjective, a mere difference of opinion, a disagreement. Either they have endless arguments about it or they agree to disagree and John uses earphones to listen to his favourite artists.

John says Paris is the capital of Germany. This is an objective statement, not an opinion. After a bit of arguing, Jane opens an atlas or Wikipedia and triumphantly shows John he is wrong. He has to concede she is right and that is it. Stating that Paris is the capital of Germany is a mistake.

Mistakes, in turn, may be slips, errors and wilful misstatements. A slip is a mistake that escaped the writer or the editor; an error is an honest mistake born out of ignorance; a wilful misstatement is made on purpose.

What to do?

If you run across a mere slip, just translate it right and be done with your job. Don't add a triumphant five-line translator's note every time you see principle where principal would be the right word. That does not show you're more intelligent, but that you're a huge pain in the ass.

If you find an error, you have to decide whether to correct it or not. If you correct it, someone will say it was just poetic license and you should have respected it; if you don't correct it, someone who never bothered to compare source and target will call it a mistranslation; if you add a translator's note, people will call you a show-off. The best thing to do is to sweep the mistake under some verbal rug Sometimes, however, the error has consequences and thus cannot simply be hidden somewhere: we have seen a harmless and delightful piece of nonsense written based on the assertion that ethics and aesthetics have a common Latin root, which simply is not true. We have good reason to believe the author simply believed words with similar sounds must have the same root and did not even know that he should check his etymologies. Fortunately, we did not have to translate it.

In such cases the best is to ask the client for instructions. "You have carte blanche to deal with this" is not a valid instruction. Someone at the client must revise and approve what you do. Don't forget to charge extra for handling the errors.

Wilful misstatements are even worse. Wilful misstatements always have consequences and are an important part of some fundamental inference made in the text, which makes them impossible to sweep under the rug or correct them in any way. Either you translate them or simply refuse to go on with the job.