A few weeks ago I visited the BMW Museum in Munich, eager to “experience perfection up close”, as the website advertises. The museum and adjoining buildings are certainly impressive to behold: after strolling through BMW Welt, a vaulting exhibition space that houses the latest vehicle models, we traversed a narrow concrete bridge to the BMW Museum, an undulating dome of polished steel and glass. BMW clearly spared little expense on this elaborate building complex, which cost a total of 700 million euros to construct. Moving through the museum’s futuristic spaces, I was thus somewhat surprised to notice a few grammatical issues in the English language placards adorning the exhibits. As I began to pay closer attention to the English descriptions and compare them to the German versions, I ultimately noted dozens of problems, from minor infelicities to more serious errors, including wholly incorrect mistranslations. While most of the English used in the permanent exhibition was decent, the temporary exhibit on e-mobility was particularly rife with error.

It was a disconcerting experience, and not just because it tarnished my impression of the BMW brand. More specifically, the slipshod English was a vivid reminder of the structural factors that assure the vast majority of English language translations in the German speaking world are mediocre and would be classified as stilted or incoherent by native speakers. Indeed, if BMW, a company that spends millions of dollars on marketing to cultivate the impression of quality, is unable to produce good English copy for their museum, how will less richly endowed organizations fare in their effort to convey a professional image abroad?

In the translation industry, both customers and suppliers are subject to incentives that encourage poor translations: high levels of competition, in part due to improved machine translation, have been exerting a downward pressure on prices, such that even big industry names now offer bargain basement rates; at the same time, German customers rarely understand that time-consuming editorial adjustments and judicious adaptation are required to generate a professional outcome in English, and, unable to accurately assess the quality of English writing delivered by translation providers, tend to prefer “direct” translations that seem faithful in a superficial way but are actually quite stilted. Indeed, many German customers place an extreme emphasis on fidelity and are quick to berate translators who attempt to distill meaning and produce a professional piece of writing through adaptation. Accordingly, translators often have a clear incentive to overlook problems and offer rote translations that are stylistically weak, as this spares them the extra effort of deconstructing the text and addressing particularly intractable problems.

A visit to the museum website only reaffirmed the poor impression I received while in Munich. Here are just a few of the problems I noticed:

(1) Basic spelling errors: “staches of tires and curbes”

(2) “its” autocorrected to “ist”:

(3) Verb tense: the simple past, not past perfect, is necessary here

(4) Poor word choice: “is 5000m2 big” is slipshod phrasing

(5) Grammatically incorrect participles (correct alternative: “Whether you visit our bistro, cafe, or restaurant, take a seat…”)

(6) Clumsy direct translation: the first sentence is awkward stylistically. “On our exhibition space” is poor. “Computer” needs to be lower case. The heading “BMW Individual” makes no sense.

To help ward off depression on the part of the reader I will end this post with a couple images of my beautiful e30 325is, which I owned from 1997 to 2018. Unlike the BMW Museum, that car was perfection up close.