…but I just love a translation that I’ve just come up with. The original was “Hoteles tan exclusivos como nuestros clientes”. After initially coming up with horrible translations like “Hotels that are as exclusive as our guests”, I suddenly thought of “Exclusive hotels for exclusive guests”.
A native speaker can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d say that this structure would not work in Spanish (“hoteles exclusivos para clientes exclusivos”). But the repetition of the word “exclusive” is not a problem in English; it helps to get the message across.
Yes Tim, “exclusive hotels for exclusive guests” gets the message across beautifully. That is also the kind of wording a professional in Marketing would come up with.
I don’t see why not use the same structure for Portuguese, breaking it down into two sentences. Good advertising for the elite – that’s what they like to hear.
Cheers!
Nice one Tim! However, I don’t agree that the other example you give is a [b]bad[/b] translation. In fact it sets up echoes in my mind of the old fairy liquid ad: “Now hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face….”
As we all know, there are no perfect translations, but a “bad” one, for me, would have to be one which did not reproduce the original meaning or introduced an element of incomprehension: For example, something like: “Hotels as exclusive as our clients” – which would have added an unecessary level of ambiguity to the translation, since in a hotel context clients is not a synonym of guests.