Professional language translation providers frequently land up with inferior quality source document, most translators I know have had such experiences. By inferior quality source document I refer to original documents that are filled with typos, factual errors, ambiguities and poor writing among others.
This is a Catch-22 situation, what does a translator do? Should he or she correct the errors and improve upon the existing quality, keeping in mind that some errors and ambiguities might be on purpose. There is no sure shot solution to this problem. What I personally do is follow some strategies which might work for some and might not for others.
The first thing to do is to get in touch with the author of the source document. You can then discuss the questionable areas of the text. However this might not be always possible, for example in cases where you got the source document from someone other than the original author whose whereabouts are not known. You can try discussing it with the client but then he/she might be equally clueless about the matter if not more.
In my case I get in touch with my client and try to follow his/her instructions. In situations, where I am left entirely to myself, I try to take the safest path. Firstly I try to avoid going ahead with such translations. If that can’t be done, I generally leave the ambiguities as they are, and only change the most obvious or glaring factual errors, otherwise more or less I stay true to the text. However the solutions to this problem can vary according to varying language translation requirements and situation, do care to chip in with you thoughts.
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