Walter Bright wrote:
Stanislav Blinov wrote:
Here I agree that paper books beat any ebooks.
As for Russian translations - I don't like them since I've taken a
look at translated GoF book on design patterns. Translations are
unbearable far too often. Most of the time, people who translate such
books are either totally incompetent in CompSci, or know little to
know aspects of the particular area covered by the book. That leads to
mistakes, inconsistensies, errors. And often, the translation itself
is hardly readable compared to original. So I'd personally rather buy
the book from original publisher (therefore giving my monetary thanks
to the author) rather than pay additional sum for questionable work of
translators and local publishers.
In the last couple of my trips to conferences in Europe, I talked to
developers who were not native english speakers about this. They were
unequivocal and emphatic in wanting to do their programming in english.
The thing is, the programming community is global, covering about every
country and language, and english is what binds them all together.
They're cut off if they are not conversant in technical english, and as
you said, are unhappy with second-rate buggy translations.
This wasn't true 25 years ago, when localizing the programming tools was
all the rage.
I can tell that this wasn't true even 15 years from here. Books,
interviews, movies, games - all had solid and nice translations,
pleasant to read an hear. But something has changed. And not for the best.
But during the time when 'localization' was not all that bad funny
things did happen too. Here in Russia there's an accountant software
package developed by 1C for some 10-15 years now. It has builtin
language that has natural 'English' form, but is available also
completely localized. All constructs, functions, keywords, everything is
translated into Russian. I can say that average-skilled programmer or
coder could easily catch up that language if he saw it in normal
English. But catching up this 'localized' flavor is a big PITA.
I use google translator a lot. Sure, it often gives very bad
translations, but they are good enough that you can get what the author
is saying.
True, and this is great mean to both stay focused and not get frustrated
when you realize that what you've read in 'official' translation was a
terrible mistake.
