John, Oh yes, I had to work in Swiss French and regular French for 3 years ...
Scott ford www.identityforge.com Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand. - Chinese Proverb On Feb 20, 2013, at 5:57 PM, John Gilmore <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
