On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Les Bell wrote:
> Tom Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >>
> I grogged what you have been writing,
> and for the examples I gave more elaborate alternatives that may be better
> understood by more people than the original text.
> <<
>
> ROF,L! What a glorious, albeit unintentional, demonstration of the point. I
> think you mean "grokked", but I rather liked your new construction of
> "grogged", redolent as it is of rum-soaked hours spent poring over the
> text.
LOL! The use of the slang word "grok" was intentional (from Robert
Heinlein's "Stranger in a strange land", if anybody here recalls ever
reading that), but the mis-spelling was not.
> In other words, a Linux administrator in Beijing probably bandies around
> the term "autoprobe" fairly often, and knows exactly what it is, but may
> well be fazed by "automatic detection" or "automatic configuration". It
> seems that Geekspeak travels better than beautiful prose English.
You have a point here, it happens a lot. I would like to point out
that many other European languages do translate the English terms to
their own (French, but also German, Spanish, Italian and Flemish). Still
I would object to just put down the key words with minimal glue. My main
point is that a well-formed sentence is less likely to have multiple
interpretations, than a grammatically incorrect one; the latter most
likely is more difficult to translate.
As an example, Chinese and Japanese have difficulties in using articles
and frequently drop them. However, there are differences in meaning
between "a system", "the system", "the systems", or "systems" in general.
--
Tom Peters
Director of the Board & Exam Development Specialist,
Linux Professional Institute
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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