Susanne Evens is spared having to make the hard sell. If she wants a new client for her company, AAA Translation, all she need mention is the Taco Bell website built for Japan with the “help” of Google Translate: “Cheesy chips became ‘low-quality chips,’ and the Crunchwrap Supreme became ‘Supreme Court Beef.’” Then there was the Coors slogan “Turn it loose”—which was translated into Spanish as “Suffer from diarrhea.” AAA captures nuances and legal shadings in more than 150 languages, using in-country translators familiar with slang and idiom.
A professional translator must learn all sorts of secrets. There’s so much I can’t tell you! We’re sworn to confidentiality. We translated for Pope John Paul II when he was here, and we still do some highly confidential stuff for the Vatican. And the Olympics—we know a lot of things that are going on behind the scenes.
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What are the most unusual languages that AAA has translated? We just did something into Swahili a couple weeks ago. We’ve done Bahasa for Indonesia, Chuukese for Micronesia. Indian tribal languages. Dead languages, like Latin.
What’s your favorite goof? Oh, I think when Clairol introduced its Mist Stick curling iron in Germany—where “mist” is slang for manure. No one raced out to buy a manure stick.
You helped an executive from South America navigate the grisly horrors of TransWorld’s Halloween & Attractions Show. What about the gentler arts? About 15 years ago, The Phantom of the Opera was here, and the Phantom called. He was going next to the opera house in Vienna to do Phantom in German, and he knew no German. One of our translators gave him lessons for six weeks.
You grew up near Stuttgart and speak six languages, yet you sound like you were born here. I speak with a very heavy German accent when I get pulled over for speeding: “Oh, I’m sorry, officer—I thought this was the autobahn!”
Have you read The Informationist? The heroine’s ability to speak many languages creates an instant bond with strangers, so she can extract information from them. Yeah, we played with it, too, growing up in Germany. You acted like you didn’t speak German so you could listen to what people were saying.
As president of St. Louis–Stuttgart Sister Cities, you’ve persuaded German firms to locate here. Now you’re on the advisory board for the St. Louis Mosaic Project. Tonight, we’re meeting with a group of Germans about the migration issues they’re facing. They want to learn from us, because the Bosnians resettled here.
Language holds all sorts of cultural cues. What differences do you notice crossing from German to English? In German, when we are mad at somebody, we call them mostly animal names. And we are a lot more direct—we say it as it is. I have to learn to keep that in check.
