As I am a translator and an economist and interested in financial matters, I have encountered an interesting text whose subject has been discussed incessantly these days.
”The president of the Finnish group Nokia, Stephen Elop, yesterday said that over the last 12-18 hours he has talked to the Romanian government, and has announced its officials about Nokia"s decision to leave Romania.”
The first inadequacy refers to the word order in a sentence, so it is better to use “said yesterday’’. Anyway, this is not always considered a mistake.
The second mistake refers to an issue, very important in English, which is the Sequence of tenses. So after the verb Say used in the Past (said), the author used has talked and has announced, which are used in the Present Perfect tense, which is a present tense. We do not normally use in English present tenses after past tenses, due to the rules that apply to the sequence of tenses. A better choice for this particular text would be to use The Past Perfect Continuous and The Past Perfect Simple instead of The Present Perfect Simple.
The correct version of the text would be:
”The president of the Finnish group Nokia, Stephen Elop, said yesterday that over the last 12-18 hours he had been talking to the Romanian government, and had announced its officials about Nokia"s decision to leave Romania.”
I used Past Perfect Tenses because, even if the actions seem to be in the present, the sentences ” he had been talking to the Romanian government, and had announced its officials about Nokia"s decision to leave Romania”, come after another sentence ”The president of the Finnish group Nokia, Stephen Elop, said yesterday”, which is in the Past.
I used The Past Perfect Continuous because the action happening over the last 12-18 hours is obviously continuous.
With my article I do not want to emphasize the fact that some translators make mistakes, but to show how to correct our mistakes that we might make because of stress, lack of time, deadlines ..and other demons.
- Web: www.cursinengleza.ro I www.engleza-de-afaceri.ro
- Tel: 0722.841.053
- E-mail: contact@engleza-de-afaceri.ro
No comments:
Post a Comment