Very true. Some 20 years ago I knew some guys here in Germany - friends
of mine -
who were unemployed teachers at that time (they studied languages to get
a job
as a teacher at colleges, which are not private in Germany, but managed
by the
state, but government didn't need them all). So they were hired by IBM
and other
tech companies to translate brochures, but they had no knowledge about the
subjects (for example computer science) at all. Well: some of them had,
but some
had not.
The results were horrible, in some cases.
I don't even know, if it is sufficient to check the translation - after
it has been done
by such a person - by another one who knows about the subject. Maybe a team
of two persons - one with translation skills and and another person, who
knows about
the subject and knows the target language - would work.
Another story:
Recently, I had to do PL/1 classes in english for co-workers from India,
and my
German handouts had to be translated to english. I couldn't do it
myself, so they
were passed to a translation bureau which translated them to english.
Apparently
they, too, had no knowledge of PL/1 and computer science. So I had to
correct
the strongest errors while doing the class - this was not easy, but in
the end it
worked and the class was successful. In fact, the class was not about PL/1;
the folks from India knew a bit about PL/1, but about the peculiarities
of our
installation (site-specific macros, coding conventions, calling methods,
parameter passing, tracing, DLLs and so on).
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 21.02.2013 08:22, schrieb Martin Truebner:
Thread shift- now: translation
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.
I like to add - and should know the subject. A book on programming in
COBOL should be done by someone that has done some COBOL-programming
and so on.
To avoid things that John cited in italian or
"Die Umgebungspaltung ist ebenso vorgeschrieben und hat feste Inhalte."
--
Martin
Pi_cap_CPU - all you ever need around MWLC/SCRT/CMT in z/VSE
more at http://www.picapcpu.de
