Perhaps unaware of the general business climate in Hungary, not to mention the rather anemic levels of customer service or sky-high taxes in Hungary which do nothing in terms of facilitating a pleasant environment for business, the Business Coach Professional Fellowship has opened a competition to find a Hungarian translation for the terms “coach” and “business coach,” hrportal.hu reported.
Anyone can participate in the competition, which is actually a way for the company to avoid having to hire a pricey PR firm to figure out just what it is they do, and the winner will receive the choice between the outstanding prizes of business coach services or a course at the Business Coach Academy worth Ft 300,000. Oh golly, how delightful!
The deadline to submit translations is December 31, and the winner will be announced on January 15, provided they can find anyone in this country who actually understands the concept and hasn’t already gone abroad.
Their requirements go beyond finding a name. When are people going to learn that upper-intermediate level English just doesn’t cut it. Most of the time it’s fine, but in a business setting you just sound clumsy. Let’s take a line from their website as proof: ‘As long as you don’t clarify where you would like to get no one can help you on the road.’ Ugh, we know what you mean and it’s close, but it isn’t business English. You need to work on those prepositions (on/along) amongst other things (*never* quote from a Queen song when you are trying to be serious).
On their intro page http://www.businesscoach.hu/index_en.html ‘Motto’ isn’t the right title for the message that follows (which is too wordy and has no pith for that job). And then follows a quasi-English attempt at marketing blurb (you need to learn when to use ‘only’ and when to use ‘just’).
On the ‘translation’ people use both ‘business’ and ‘coach’ so what is there to translate? OK, try the synonyms or ‘translations’ that just amount to bad spelling. So you could have mentor, coach, apprentice, peer… Then in Hungarian the range of ideas would be things like szakmentor, szak-mentor, vállalati mentor, szakmailag lektorált, szakértői bírálat/felülvizsgálat/értékelés… hundreds more. Or my favourite üzleti mentor.
Finally, the use of noun-noun leads to ambiguity so you might want to rework the English title. Is it a professional fellowship or a fellowship for professionals?
I’ll pass on the prize, thanks.
I wonder if these guys fly coach or business class… or just no-class.