Social Security number (idea)

Now, the Netherlands certainly has, along with coffee shops, windmills, bicycles and Indonesian restaurants, a social security system of some standing, and people who pay contributions have a number called, as it happens, the SOFI-nummer.

However, translation is not that simple a task and that is not the appropriate answer. We need to understand the context of the query. As it happened, what the translator was working on was a form for use by air travellers on an American airline who wished to report missing luggage.

Clearly, this is not an matter in which your social security payment record is particularly relevant. The airline, used to catering for domestic customers, who carry no identity cards or (for internal flights) passports but know their social security numbers by heart, was (leaving aside marketing conspiracies or commercial intelligence as a secondary consideration) presumably using this as a means of providing an unambiguous identifier for the people involved. The Dutch and Belgians may have social security reference numbers in a file somewhere, but the only purpose they serve is in dealings with the social security authorities and nobody actually knows their number without going to some lengths to look it up; conversely, they do extremely little in the way of passport-free domestic air travel and are required to carry identity documents at all times in any event.

Therefore the appropriate solution for the translator was to write a translator's note to point out to their client that the form required proper internationalization, perhaps with an field for the type of ID and another for its number.

It is this type of international communication issue that brightens up the otherwise sad lives of translators and allows us to feel that it will be a while yet before babelfish takes our jobs away.