I visited this tiny winery on a holiday in La Rioja and loved everything about the project; its revival of a forgotten winemaking industry in a city centre, its celebration of underappreciated grape varieties, and of course its regenerative approach to viticulture (oh, and wines, which feature on dozens of Michelin-starred restaurant wine lists). I highly recommend a visit if you’re in or around Logroño.

As many small independent businesses with tightly managed budgets do, the team originally used Google to generate the English version of their website, and the results really weren’t doing their fantastic project justice. So, when they invested in a gorgeous new website design, I was delighted that they asked me to craft their English content.

What story am I telling? How am I telling it?

Are the two main questions I ask myself in a pre-translation Source Text analysis. I’m looking for what the client is particularly proud of and then weaving it together with my knowledge of what makes their new audience tick, to guide my choice of language as I translate. As well as its uniquely bijou urban bodega and correspondingly artisan production, what really defines the Arizcuren project is neatly summed up by my favourite line from the Spanish copy, a quote from Javier Arizcuren;

“Lo más innovador es, irónicamente, volver a las raíces”

(The most innovative approach is, ironically, to return to one’s roots).

As new-fangled a term as ‘regenerative viticulture’ may be, low intervention and allowing nature to balance itself is quite the opposite. Arizcuren are proud of their traditional, artisan approach, but it’s great for tourists, too. In contrast to visiting the bigger wineries, they see the full, grape-to-bottle journey of artisan wine production. Likewise, their efforts to revive and champion forgotten and underappreciated grapes makes for fascinating tastings, featuring exciting single-varietal wines and a perhaps welcome departure from wall-to-wall tempranillo.

Can’t AI do it?

The very first heading on Arizcuren’s home page, “Somos Viñedo“, is translated by AI as “We are Vineyard”, a literal translation which sounds pretty odd to a native speaker. Not that this heading is an easy one to translate. It took me a bit of head scratching before settling on “We are Our Vineyards”, but that’s just the thing. Creative texts like marketing copy can be really challenging (and rewarding) to translate well, even for humans. It can take a professional translator upwards of double the time to translate web marketing content compared with, say, a set of instructions or a contract.

If a title can prove so tricky for AI, you can perhaps imagine how bizarre a whole page of AI-generated marketing copy could turn out. But why imagine? Take an excerpt of copy from a Google translated website.

“Good vinegrowers take the landscapes of their vineyard to the bottle and make us dream of those lands.”

Does it make sense? Maybe… if we’re being generous and allowing a hefty chunk of poetic licence. Would any English-speaker ever say or write that? Absolutely not. Yes, AI is free, fast, and very tempting, but if you prefer your English copy just as engaging as the carefully crafted original, and would rather not risk a website full of translations like the above gem, maybe just drop me a line.