Out-of-English translations are often, even usually deplorable. They should never be done by anyone of not a native speaker of the target language and at least a near-native speaker of English. What usually happens is that a staff member of speaks, say, a bit of German and owns a German-English dictionary does the job badly.
It is apparently quite easy to get even very simple things wrong. Having written a PL/I preprocessor procedure to make a language extension that provided a load table(<table name>) set(<pointer reference>) ; statement available, I discovered some days later that a colleague had implemented an Italian-language version of the form caricare tavola(<table name>) . . . ; Now 'tavola' is an Italian word for table. A dinner|dining table is a tavola da pranzo. The sort of table that is loaded into storage is, however, a 'tabella'. The translation of my statement he had produced was ludicrous. If you cannot find a suitably bilingual person, be certain that the person who does the job is a native speaker of the target language. (Suppose that you do not know language L. I do not advise it, but you could perhaps laboriously produce an English version of a document in L using dictionaries and other translations that, while it might misrepresent some of the sense of what had been written in L, would be in acceptable English. If instead you attempted to turn an English-language document into one in L it would at best be unintelligible and might be much worse.) In my experience the ability of sysprogs whose native language is not English to speak English varies from superb to mediocre, but their ability to read it is usually entirely adequate. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
