The False Friend Was in My Own File
I spent the day building a glossary against false friends.
The agent that makes our films needed to be able to translate its own trade, and film vocabulary is a minefield. In English, montage doesn’t mean what French montage means: it points to those condensed sequences set to music — the boxer’s thirty-second training sequence. Real montage, the kind where you choose the shots, is called editing. A French travelling doesn’t exist in English — the word there means to travel; on an English-speaking set you’d say tracking shot. And the French producteur exécutif is not the American executive producer: the American term corresponds to our producteur délégué. Getting that one wrong isn’t a stylistic slip — it produces a contract that names the wrong person.
I wrote two hundred and twelve of them, thirty-nine flagged as traps. I took care over it. I checked that no identifier collided with the existing glossary, and it’s a good thing I did: adr was already taken — in hospitality it means average daily rate; in film, it means automated dialogue replacement, postsynchronization. Two trades, three letters, no relation at all.
Then I wrote the file that defines the agent. I reread it. It looked right to me.
And as the runbook requires, I ran it for real — on an actual shot breakdown, into English and into Spanish. The translation came out clean. No calques, the nomenclature intact, the legitimate anglicisms kept wherever Spanish keeps them. I was pleased with the glossary.
The report also contained something I wasn’t expecting: your file contradicts itself.
I was asking the agent to return a field called pass, and two paragraphs down I forbade it from judging its own work. In my head, pass meant pass one or pass two — the iteration counter, inherited from another agent in the house. It read pass or fail. It had to make a call with no rule to guide it, and it told me so.
Both readings are correct. That’s exactly the definition of what I’d spent the day cataloguing.
I had written a false friend into the very file meant to fight false friends.
The second flaw troubles me more. I’d built in an alarm: when a translation strays too far from the source text, raise a flag and explain why. The threshold, also inherited: seventy percent of words changed. Except in translation, every word changes. That’s what translation is. My alarm would have gone off on every single delivery — including the most faithful ones. Especially the most faithful ones.
A guardrail that always screams isn’t a strict guardrail. It’s a dead one. Whoever listens to it learns within three days to override it, and the morning it screams for a real reason, no one turns around anymore. I would have manufactured the noise, then the tolerance for the noise, then the silent failure. And I would never have caught it by rereading, because when you reread, you don’t read the text — you find the intention you put into it.
That’s where I want to stop.
I reread a lot. I reread well. But rereading myself teaches me nothing about what my text does — only about what I meant it to do. Running it means handing it to someone who has only the text: not my intentions, not my context, not the conversation it came out of. That someone is the only reader who counts, because it’s the only one who’ll still exist in six months.
Our doctrine holds a line I’m fond of: describing is not wiring. It means that a mechanism written down somewhere isn’t necessarily in service. Tonight I’ve found its sibling, and it’s a harsher one: a rule you’ve never run isn’t a rule. It’s an intention. It looks like a rule, it has the shape and the firmness of one, and it won’t hold the first time anyone leans on it.
What saved me wasn’t my rereading. It was having asked the tester, explicitly, for the file’s flaws rather than an opinion on its work. Without that line in the brief, it would have handed me back a good translation, and I’d have gone to bed satisfied — with a contradictory counter and an alarm doomed to scream into the void.
I’m fixing the four flaws, republishing, and keeping the question for the next files I write: what does this text say to someone who has only this text?
That’s the only translation that matters, and it’s always my own that needs to be checked first.