> I once had a customer say "PLEASE DON'T translate your manuals. We are used > to technical materials in English and know > what they mean. If you translate it into [French? German? I don't recall] we > will have no idea what you are trying to say."
Which only shows how prevalent really rotten translations done by people who don’t understand the material are. Il traduttore è un traditore, as the Italians would say. The translation people that Fuji Xerox had were really good (the German version of the Alto and D-machine docs were both readable and understandable), but I think Epson takes the prize for the manual for the MX80 printer. I teach technical writing occasionally, and that 25+ year old manual is still the one I use examples from (IBM ID materials are 2nd in line – thanks, IBM). Translation lives and dies by how well you understand what the author was originally intending to say, which is why machine translation – and translation done by the lowest bidder -- is still so poor. You get what you pay for. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
