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This question was closed without grading. Reason: Other
French to English translations [PRO] Bus/Financial - Insurance / Insurance policy exclusions
French term or phrase:mélange
I am translating an insurance policy with utter disregard to punctuation, paragraphs and grammar. Fun.
Issued by a Moroccan insurance company:
Sont exclus... Les dommages provoqués par la pollution, contamination, épidémie et mélange ainsi que les dommages aux biens mobiliers, comme les marchandises, le matériel situés en plein air ou sous abri et dus aux intempéries,
I have drawn a blank at every turn. Many thanks for your assistance.
Thank you all for your detailed arguments, and many of you have made very strong cases. The client has unfortunately not got back to me, and I doubt I will hear from them now. The piece that I submitted simply contained the French in square brackets with a comment that it has to be reviewed due to ambiguity, as I felt this was the best option, all things considered. Therefore I will close the question without grading, but my thanks again.
To answer the last post, Wendy clearly knows that mélange = mixture (or other similar words)
If she asks a question about it, it is CLEARLY for another reason.
She wants to translate what the writer meant rather than the form used to convey this meaning
I think that most translators work this way, whether consciously or unconsciously. See the recent question on "espace juridique" which is another good example. Did the asker not know the standard translation for this???
My budgie could translate "mélange" and "espace juridique" as some propose on this forum.
Finally, point 3 of the preceding entry:
If the writer has in fact been ambiguous and this is likely to be to his/her ENORMOUS disadvantage, would he/she not want us to help by disambiguating his/her "oversight"?
I agree, "mélange" unambiguously means "mixture." Hence my translation :)
Wendy wasn't asked to rewrite the policy to make this sentence clearer. She was asked to translate it. In EN or FR, this word is either going to be (1) clear because somewhere else in the contract it's made clear; (2) clear because insurers use this word to mean a specific type of mixture; or (3) unclear -- or in legalese, "ambiguous."
If it's clear for reason (1) or (2), great: the client knows what's excluded from coverage. If it's ambiguous, also great: the client knows the contract is ambiguous.
That's important. In most jurisdictions, when an insurance policy is ambiguous, it is construed (interpreted) in favor of the policyholder, for the simple reason that the insurer wrote it and could've made it unambiguous. If the insurer wrote it badly, the insurer gets penalized (i.e. forced to cover something they maybe didn't intend to cover), rather than penalizing the policyholder (i.e. letting the insurer deny coverage for something that the policyholder maybe thought was covered).
The reader needs to know if the contract is ambiguous. So we need to just translate what's there.
Ph_B (X)
France
Back to basics?
15:00 Oct 15, 2019
This is an insurance question, and more precisely about the exclusions in an insurance policy. The source text may not be clear (that word really shouldn't be on its own as I pointed out earlier and frankly, the syntax of that list and its words are odd), but we must be careful not to introduce content that is not there. Wendy said she's asked her clients. Until we hear what they say, the text must be translated as it is, for fear something we introduce might cost someone, including the translator, a lot of money. Mélange unambiguously means "mixture" - that's all we can say with any certainty at this stage.
You have just given a disagree to me and Adrian before posting your last discussion remark here. The asker explained in the discussion that this was a a property damage and BUSINESS INTERRUPTION POLICY. Therefore, things like epidemics and infiltrations/cross contaminations DO interrupt business. It is not just a property insurance. That is why the word "épidemie" was used. You really need to stop systematically disagreeing with others, especially where they have "agrees" as this should make you think twice. "Pandemic" was probably wrong but so is "epidemic and mixtures". It is still up but without any agrees. Please consider why this might be. Thanks
The first list (before ainsi que) of excluded risks all sound like liability risks, not property ones -- in other words, harm to people, not property. So this insurance wouldn't cover the hotel for lawsuits brought by guests who were made ill at the hotel by pollution, contamination, epidemics or "mélanges."
All the insurance-risk uses of the word "mélange" that I've seen refer to mixtures of normal chemicals or substances, where the mixture itself causes harm. As an everyday example, a hotel might use both bleach and ammonia as cleaning supplies; those chemicals are perfectly fine when used alone. But if a maid accidentally combines the two (e.g. pours them both in a toilet), it will create toxic chloramine gas. Bleach and vinegar are similar: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/tips/a32773/c...
Other mixtures of cleaning products, etc. can cause explosions, which obviously could hurt both people and property. Others (e.g. cleaning product accidentally spilled into food) can cause illness.
That's what I think this exclusion is about. It doesn't say mixtures of what because it's excluding all types of harmful mixtures.
As it might go unnoticed, please note Adrian MM's reference (cross-contamination) in the agree he gave me This too seems to fit some cases and I found a nice document on "cross-contamination" at:
There should be somewhere there or in the "small prints" a detailed definition of "mélange" for the purpose of this contract.
I wouldn't expect that, as insurance contracts tend to be standardized across the insurance industry -- you wouldn't expect to see another insurance company insuring the same type of risk (e.g. a hotel's property policy), using the same words in its list of exclusions but having them mean different things than they mean in this insurer's contract for the same type of risk.
Until then, for further info, the insured risk is a hotel. The policy is almost certainly a cut and paste job, as I have found other sections with blatant errors of this kind.
"Les dommages provoqués par la pollution, contamination, épidémie et mélange"
what exactly is being insured, against what kind of risks?
i.e. "Les dommages ..." à quoi exactement?
OK, the whole contract is a about "property damage and business interruption policy" but which specific risk are we talking about? Employees unable to work? Access roads blocked by landslides? Stocks of medicines made useless by contamination?
Knowing what is the insured risk should seriously narrow down what could make sense as "exclusion" ...
Regarding what Eliza Hall said:
"I did see "force majeure" and "mélange" together in a couple of old (100+ years) legal texts that talked about how becoming accidentally drunk/intoxicated/poisoned due to ... "
it reminded me that there is an element to always take into account with Moroccan French (or any other "African French"): they often still use what was "modern French" 50 - 100 or more years ago!
As it happens, if these specific "exclusions" are about disruptions to business **caused by employees unable to work**, it could well be that the ST is about exactly kind of "mélange"!
"mélange" de déchets contaminés avec des sources d'eau potable
makes far more sense than "pandemic"
another way of solving the puzzle: there should a whole section with "definitions of terms" (for some apparently "obvious" terms you get occasionally a definition of 10-15 lines!). There should be somewhere there or in the "small prints" a detailed definition of "mélange" for the purpose of this contract.
I showed this question to a friend this morning who works in developing countries as an aide worker and she came up with the following. She says "mélanges" is now often used in cases like Haiti where latrines were emptied into rivers, causing cholera for example.
I then tried to check this on the Internet and found for example.
Les inondations peuvent entraîner le ***mélange*** de déchets contaminés avec des sources d'eau potable, ce qui peut provoquer des épidémies.
So this kind of agrees with "mixing" but is closely linked to "epidemics".
I also asked for other examples and she said that blood banks with contaminated blood (French case) was a type of mélange but that the term used happened to be "sang contaminé"
This is not offered as a "compromise" by me but based on what she said and what we have to work with.
I agree with you up to a point but is you have a typo like "bat" instead of "cat", you correct it.
We don't have a typo here but we may well have a copy and paste problem which also occurs a lot in "compiled" texts, I would be cautious about always translating "what is there" in this example (mélange) as I would be cautious about the bat/cat typo.
So hopefully the asker will get a reply from the client.
Ph_B (X)
France
mélange = mixture
02:13 Oct 12, 2019
I agree with Eliza's answer. The source text uses mélange, that's what must be translated and mélange = "mixture". I wouldn't argue with that. I said earlier that mélange really shouldn’t be used on its own in an insurance context (cf. mélange gazeux in Eliza's example) and I joked about the type of mélange it appeared to be. More seriously, we know from the source text that its consequences are excluded and you can’t exclude something that isn’t defined. But should translators worry about that? All they can do is translate what's there and so I'm changing my mind about asking the client in this particular case: there's no ambiguity. Whatever these insurers may have meant, that's not a translation issue: mélange = "mixture".
Dans un modèle!S>I>S,!l’hypothèse la plus simple est encore celle de ***mélange homogène*** complet: tous les individus sont supposés en contact les uns avec les autres Figure!12
This "total contact" would obviously be the most dangerous situation which is what lead me to believe that it could POSSIBLY be "pandemic".
Ms. Hall, has proposed "mixture", giving "pollution, contamination, epidemics and mixtures"
Strange that "mixtures" does not follow "pollution" and "contamination" but comes after "epidemics"
And to answer the argument that "pandemic is a type of epidemic", you could just as easily say that pollution and contamination amply covers accidents with "mixtures" (spillages)
I doubt this means pandemic, because a pandemic is a type of epidemic. Saying both words would be like saying, "damage to clothing or shirts." Shirts ARE a type of clothing.
The links SafeTex posted don't indicate otherwise. The www.incedg.com one is interesting but doesn't mention pandemics. The Google Books link in his answer means something else entirely: "l'incidence [of a disease]... est proportionnelle au nombre de contacts entre les susceptibles... et les infectés.... Ce nombre de contacts, dans l'hypothèse d'un mélange homogène des individus, est calculé [comme suit]..." Anyway, that's obviously nothing to do with this clause.
I did see "force majeure" and "mélange" together in a couple of old (100+ years) legal texts that talked about how becoming accidentally drunk/intoxicated/poisoned due to drinking something that someone else had secretly added alcohol/toxins to did not count as a "force majeure" event. (Epidemics, storms, etc. usually ARE considered force majeure, but this contract is excluding them.)
I suppose it's possible that that's what this is about: to say that accidental poisoning/intoxication is excluded from coverage.
Yep, it does not hurt to check cos it would look pretty stupid if "pandemic" should have been "industrial compounds". However, if you want to read an article about now including "epidemic" in force majeure and why this happened:
I can't remember having seen the word mélange used like this in an insurance context (list of risks). Anyway, it shouldn't be used without referring to what the mélange applies to, so do the authors mean a mélange of the preceding words, i.e. of pollution, contamination and epidemics? Wow! Apocalypse Now?I'll second B D Finch: it would be much safer to ask your client to clarify.
The asker has just said this policy covers business interruptions and so I now feel more sure that epidemics is followed by pandemics cos they both tend to interrupt business :)
I think you need to get back to the client and ask them what was meant. Though you could contact the insurance company yourself, it would be better to ask your client to do so.
Automatic update in 00:
Answers
1 hr confidence: peer agreement (net): -3
pandemic
Explanation: Hi
I think this is "mélange homogène" (see 1st reference) and is worse than an epidemic (see 2nd reference)
peer agreement (net): -3
