Translating Hungarian property tax bill

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ok thank you

a very similar question has been asked in the last day called "Property Tax Advice Please"  this has been answered by several long term residents of Hungary. i cannot really help you with so vague a question. I can translate it for you but would need actually to see the bill to make an accurate translation, as would any translator.

You do not need a legally appointed translator, yo onloy need someone who can speak Hungarian to translate it for you.

SimonTrew wrote:

a very similar question has been asked in the last day called "Property Tax Advice Please"

Simon, its the same person, they started a new thread with a new question.

SimonTrew wrote:

You do not need a legally appointed translator, yo onloy need someone who can speak Hungarian to translate it for you.

This is true.

However, when dealing with a letter from a government agency, such as the tax authority, which will include legal terminology, hiring someone with professional experience dealing with such letters is maybe preferable, to get the legal language and details correct. As you have commented in other posts. And a professional has a business interest to get it right; not just to maintain a good reputation, but a business can be held liable for errors. If a "helpful" person gets it wrong they may just shrug, and the "client" has no recourse.

Of course, in full transparency my wife does professional translations. So one can place this in whatever context one wants. Everyone is an adult here, and can make decision/consequence calls as they see fit.

Side note: Just walking around Hungary one can find a slew of lousy translations. Far too many here think because they speak a little German or English they can be a translator. Just one example, and this one is funny, and sad, at the same time:

http://www.veszprem.hu/veszpremieknek/f … os-welcome

But you would need a translator in the UK (Leeds by going by your profile). A google search will give you quite a few hits on Translators in your area.

SimCityAT wrote:

But you would need a translator in the UK

Why? Documents can be scanned and emailed anywhere in the world to be translated.

klsallee wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

But you would need a translator in the UK

Why? Documents can be scanned and emailed anywhere in the world to be translated.

True, but if you can see the person in person, that's still an option.

SimCityAT wrote:

klsallee wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

But you would need a translator in the UK

Why? Documents can be scanned and emailed anywhere in the world to be translated.

True, but if you can see the person in person, that's still an option.

Having run an IT business for many years, I hired some excellent coders around the globe. I hired them based on what they could produce and the quality of their work, and if they delivered on time. I never met most of them. And I worked for some clients I also never met as well. Meeting in person is not needed for many work products.

There is also the option for video conferencing.

klsallee wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

You do not need a legally appointed translator, yo onloy need someone who can speak Hungarian to translate it for you.

This is true.

However, when dealing with a letter from a government agency, such as the tax authority, which will include legal terminology,..
Of course, in full transparency my wife does professional translations.

You are also right too of course, but for simple matters when you have the bill in front of you, my personal choice would not be to involve a professional translator when my wife speaks native Hungarian and I native English and for any technical term, legal or practical or otherwise, we go around the houses deliberately describing something rather than trying to give the English or Hungarian word so that it causes the other to suggest the right word, but then neither of us are professional translators with recourse to proper translation dictionaries and so on, we have the Akadamia Kiado consice translation in two volumes each about an inch thick but I think the whole set runs to twenty volumes of about the same size, so the concise does not give idiom for specific language fields. (Try translating "Fields" for example. Electromagnetic fields? Fields of expertise or knowledge? Those bits of greenery that keep towns apart from each other? W. C. Fields? The Champs-Elyséés in Paris, that is, the Elysian Fields in Ancient Greece? Surely it is never "in the field of human confict", etc etc. Context is everything.)

I would warn against going with the first translator you call upon, as translators have their own specialisms too. The one we apponted to do the legal contract for our house buying we found out had never done that form of translation so could not translate for example what in English law we call "joint and several liability", that is the joint first party (my wife and I), if one does not pay the other must, the liability is held jointly and severally. This was translating from Hungarian to English, and she did not know that legal phrase or meaning. This is of course nothing but due respect to Mrs Kisallee because translation is very difficult, so make sure you get the right translator. Declaration of interest: I specialised in machine translation as my first bachelor's degree., twenty-five years ago. It has got a bit better, my final essay was on statistical machine translation, and I know what howlers it can throw up if you are not careful, as it only works off what it believes are parallel texts. I have seen round-tripping in Wikipedia when the missus and I used to translate before we gave up, if she happened to edit an article from Hungarian I would then see my English translation (not a bad translation, but the only one given) on statistical machine translation websites the next time I tried to go the other way and go hang on.... because Wikipedia was the only site that is relatively easy to have a reasonably chance of getting a sentence-by-sentence translation. But since Hungarian and English have surface SVO (subject-verb-object) order, neither has grammatical gender, and so on, you would think it would be like for like, but it is not because of changing the structure of whole paragraphs or articles, what is important to a Hungarian audience is not as important to an English-speaking one, every Hungarian knows who István Szechenyi was but few English-speakers do so it may have to be linked or have a brief parenthesis, and so on, so parallel texts are not as parallel as they first appear.

I have forgotten most of the smatterings of languages I learned for that, since the point was not to learn a language but to learn how languages work (or how we think they work). To translate something like "conch-pin" or "later Devonian period" you are not going to ask a translator specialising in law.

What the wife I did was basically translate the first draft for the translatrix so running through she could just point out any ambiguities etc which saved a lot of work and time on both sides, the translator's and ours. It did not save any money. But it saved a lot of time, since we are the ones who have viewed the house etc etc so we have more knowledge of it than her and can easily correct any factual slips.

I presume it goes without saying, don't trust an online machine translation service, not a free one anyway, and don't trust someone who claims they can speak English if you need it in the direction Hungarian to English, that is usually going to be schoolchild English. You should as a professional translator only ever translate into your native language, never out of it. So my wife translates into Hungarian and I translate into English, never the other way around, even though we are both intelligent and knowledgeable people, that is why we grab for words and go round the houses to make sure the translation is right,

Again to be sans doubte, neither of us claims to be a professional translator or translatrix, that is just how we do it between ourselves to a standard that passes muster when we don't need an official notarisation. (So how do you translate "pass muster"? )

SimonTrew wrote:

I would warn against going with the first translator you call upon, as translators have their own specialisms too.

For critical issues, I think most people know to either shop around or at least ask a professional -- doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, etc. -- for references or evidence of their experience in the topic.

But of course, one must also put that into context as well.

If, for example one needs major elective surgery, one indeed should get at least a second opinion.

But if one cuts themselves and needs stitches, a MD diploma on a wall is probably a good enough evidence for experience that the person probably can sew up the cut. Doubt it is needed or worth it to shop around, dripping blood between doctor offices..... 

SimonTrew wrote:

You should as a professional translator only ever translate into your native language, never out of it.

If someone is born in Germany, their native language is German, but if they left Germany at age 5 and then spend 30 years in France going to school and speaking French, they may know French better than German at that point.

And professional translators also can prove proficiency in another language, by passing internationally recognized professional language tests to prove their skills.

Also translators can also simply do the main rough work, then they can cooperate with a native speaking proof reader to localize content and context.

So, in short, there are many factors to consider, so one should never say "never"......

klsallee wrote:

Also translators can also simply do the main rough work, then they can cooperate with a native speaking proof reader to localize content and context.

So, in short, there are many factors to consider, so one should never say "never"......

And the other way around of course, people who are not professional translators but experts in their subject can often do the main rough work and co-operate with the translator to polish it up. It is a co-operative act after all as with working with any professional, it is not a "throw it over the wall" job. It is certainly not a question of saving money, that is a false economy, but anyway you will save money since you won't have to print loads of erratum slips, woman a helpdesk for people not understanding the technical documentation, etc etc.

It is a question of what is the best way of working together.  Sometimes it is about teaching the translator the technical vocabulary, but translators are not stupid, of course. It is all about working together.

Rank Xerox at Xerox PARC did one of the earliest machine translation systems outside of the military, and they had a very restricted vocabulary from English to several other European languages. One of the things they learned from their research was that in rewriting the English manuals so that the "foreign" language translations were more faithful, the English was altoso clearer, kinda Orwellian Newspeak, plain English. Instead of having "Button" and "Pushbutton"  for examople they only had "button". Well it is not as if you have a "pullbutton". By reducing the language the intent even in the original,. or rather the revised English, was a lot clearer by all the academic reading scores for clarity, the statistical scores   - and they were not aiming for that, it was a by-product of reducing the vocabulary.

Of course literary translation is an entirely different thing from technical translation, that has really completely different rules because you are not ultimately aiming for technical accuracy. I have often wondered how Newspeak wouold be translated into Ukranian or Russian (Animal Farm was published in Ukranian before it was in English, and has elements of Newspeak in it) certainly the Appendix to Nineteen-Eighty-Four discussing the principles of Newspeak would seem almost impossible to translate since the whole point is to separate meaning from words, I would never be able to do that kind of translation even if I knew the other language well. I could probably make a passable literal translation into French, but it would be entirely meaningless, because you wouold have to translate and set the entire story in France and French and I would not be able to do that, Like what is the French for "Big Brother" even? "Grand frére" I suppose literally. Yet I have read most of Voltaire in French but not in English and so for me to translate what is meaningful to me "il faut cultiver notre jardin", in Candide, "we must dig our own garden", I would translate as "we must plough our own furrow", and I have no idea how it is actually translated, but that seems to make more idiomatic English to me than "we must dig our own garden". Reap and ye shall sow, so there are all these Biblical allusions below the surface, as I say, literary translation is an art form in its own right. You don't want Boris Pasternak ending up as Boris Parsnip.

klsallee wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

You should as a professional translator only ever translate into your native language, never out of it.

If someone is born in Germany, their native language is German, but if they left Germany at age 5 and then spend 30 years in France going to school and speaking French, they may know French better than German at that point.

I would say for that example their mother tongue was German but their native language was French, but now we are just arguing semantics and where language skills come in a child's development, of which there seems to be a panoply of views. I know when I went to school aged 5 I knew all my letters to speak and to read and write them, most children barring disability seem perfectly capable of stringing sentences together reasonably grammatically by the age of 5, they make mistakes in English by saying "sheeps" instead of "sheep" i.e. have learned the rule but not the exception, and English spelling is a right mess, even in American spelling "dolor" and "color" for example, or "debtor" even in American the b is not pronounced as it used to be in both British and American, an eighteenth century affectation since it is not pronounced in french "dette" or written so it is entirely bogus for that "b" to be there in the first place, it was this idea that English has to follow Latin spelling rules and because it is in "debit" which is Latin, but only one example or two of that ever being used in the ancient oliterature and that was in Vulgar Latin, we have little idea what they really were, anyway, so 18th century grammarians made them up. There is no distinction between letter U and V in  Latin, we mae that distinction, after a lot of phonetic guessing of romance languages. It was never written as U because it is sodding hard work with a chisel, straight lines much easier. Yet we don't write six in Roman numerals as "UI" but why not? We guess from modern sound systems and poetry through the ages there was a verbal distinction that was not a written distinction, e.g. like the voiced "th" in modern English as in "the" or "thorn" (and it was originally the old English letter "thorn" anyway) so it is just educated guesswork, and not particularly reliable, otherwise Spaniards in Spain would prononce "c" in "cerveza", beer, the same as they do in Mexico, and they don't. So we have absolutely no way of knowing how Latin was actually pronounced, we cant even in English go back far beyond the Great Vowel Shift of the late 14th century.

I have really drifted off topic now. Sorry.

SimonTrew wrote:

Yet I have read most of Voltaire in French but not in English and so for me to translate what is meaningful to me "il faut cultiver notre jardin", in Candide, "we must dig our own garden", I would translate as "we must plough our own furrow", and I have no idea how it is actually translated, but that seems to make more idiomatic English to me than "we must dig our own garden". Reap and ye shall sow

"Sow and ye shall reap" of course. Merriam Webster has it as "we must tend to our own affairs", which is je m'en pisse, that brings it down with a bump. Sorry I am way off topic. I shut up now.