This note from the translator - would strongly suggest that translating the statements was not exactly a walk in the park.
QUOTE
905 to 917 Witness statement of Matthew David Oldfield 2007.05.10
918-Consent for mouth swab for Matthew David Oldfield
TRANSLATION BY ALBYM
04-Processo 04 Page 905 to 917
[M Oldfield's Statement 10th May Again, there were several omissions from, and errors in, the original Portuguese. I corrected those that I found. Also, much of the Portuguese statement is written with a convoluted 'future + past' verb construct that attributes an 'uncertainty' to the words, whereas I have translated much of it in a non-literal manner to make it read more definitively. Hence, the reader must understand that neither the Portuguese nor my translation necessarily constitute the exact words spoken by Oldfield.
If you read MO's Rogatory Letter testimony you will get a sense of the difficulty the Portuguese interpreter faced when listening to this man.]
End quote
Surely the only reason the McCanns would have the files translated by professionals is because of inaccuracies.
One mistranslated word can change the whole meaning of a sentence.
Another example of how translating and retranslating can produce errors is mentioned in Kate's book about her diary which was translated from English to Portuguese and then back to English.
Quote
''I was really upset'' had become ''I was fed up''
''I never felt that relaxed'' had become 'I'd never felt so relaxed''
Unquote
In that last example by changing just two little words i.e.
''that'' to ''so''
and
''I'' to ''I'd'' ..... means that the opposite meaning of what she had really said was wrongly conveyed to the reader.
When I got assaulted, the police constable did not conduct an interview that was recorded. Nor did he write my statement as a 100% accurate record of what I literally said. Indeed, in that statement, there was nothing in the format 'SIL said that ...'. It was a non-verbatim account of what had happened.
I was then asked to read the statement, and sign if I agreed it was accurate.
The procedure involved in Portugal is, for some, one step more complex than this, purely due to the fact that certain people don't speak Portuguese. In that case translation is needed.
Does Portuguese use identical structures to English? Of course not, that is why it is a foreign language. The acid test is still whether anyone complained that their statement, signed by them as being accurate, was in fact in error.
I am not going to go down the diary route unless someone persuades me it was entered into evidence, which I understand it was not. I have no recollection of Kate signing a translation of her diary to say it was accurate.
