What is translation? On a platter
 A poet's pale and glaring head
 A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter
 And profanation of the dead.

(Vladimir Nabokov)

What is really interesting is when we have a documentation team that changes
our English descriptions to fit the Chicago Manual of Style, thereby making
nonsense of the original meaning.

David de Jongh

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of Rob van der Heij
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 3:23 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Translation (Re: Load and Add)

On 21 February 2013 10:00, Shane G <[email protected]> wrote:
> Many years ago, we had to persevere with MSP manuals from Fujitsu - in
Jinglish.
>
> The story we got was that the manuals (basically MVS) were translated
> to "English", then handed to people in/from Hawaii that were
> conversant in both Japanese and American (English).
> We used to joke that there was no chance of decent manuals as they
> were produced by two groups that didn't have English as a first
> language ...  <g,d,r>

Back in the early MSX days, we had English manuals inspired by the Japanese
development team. It took me a long time to understand what the phrase "up
allow C" would mean. Eventually we discovered it was the act of typing "C"
with the Ctrl-key pressed, originally probably written as "^C" and
translated to "up arrow" which then got lost on the phone :-)

Rob

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