A large part of job this past year has been to take German training material and convert it to English training material. You would think that this would be easy. I have a team in Germany who are bi lingual and who take the German (their native language) and put it into English however even though German and English share many common roots the meaning of the material is very often lost or worse its emphasis is misplaced.
I have two year of school girl German learning only. But, I'm a sport so I said I'd have a go. I have found it easier to take the source German stuff it through google translate and then correct it back to English English as the google was translating to better than my colleagues. We refer to the English version my colleagues produce as Denglish. They are insistent that they write American English and that other colleagues in the Far East want Asia pacific English. Now I'm married to an Aussie and he speaks English English as do my colleagues in New Zealand and Hong Kong. I did 2 years of Germans at school and because my industry knowledge is good I can make a petty mean stab at the technical info I work with on a daily basis so I thought, what OH, I'll have a go at my German lace books and yes, I can work out the information slowly but I couldn't and wouldn't want to translate them for someone else as I appreciate the need for the right nuisances I order to make it work. For me, reading German lace books and French (which I read much better than German) it's more than I understand the meaning rather than translate the words. The Aussie used to speak Indonesian fluently for his work as he worked translating speech to text and he said that he would directly translate what he heard which is wrong because it is slow and the grammar doesn't always translate. This is why technical translators are often specialised to both the language and area of translation. I knew a translator who specialism was German medical books. Give her a newspaper in German and she struggled because her vocabulary wasn't there. Our student, last year, offered to translate some of my lace books but didn't have the words to describe the stitches, equipment or terms. This makes professional translation costly. Oh for a bable fish. Kind Regards Liz Baker > On 6 Mar 2014, at 08:13, Jean Nathan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Fortunately many instruction books have such good diagrams that being able to > understand the words isn't as much a handicap as it could be - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
