Re: machine translations, debian odc in foreign langs..
On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 09:48:33AM +0200, RIBNITZ Robert wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Personally I think that rather than having the manuals autotranslated in
> every conceivable language, we should rather work on _quality_ of the
> translations.
>
> Very recently I looked at the spanish installation manual. I am not a native
> spanish speaker, my native language is german. While that translation surely
> had no syntactic or grammatical errors, as far as I could tell, it did not
> 'sound spanish: in other words, I think someone whose mother tongue was
> spanish would have worded it rather differently (no, I dont want to start a
> war on european spanish vs. latinamerican spanish).
>
Note that this is a general comment and not addressed at the spanish
translation.
It is common for people who don't have a lot of practice translating
text to translate 'word for word' and only fixing the glaring mistakes this
creates. Although usually technically correct, the resulting text often
doesn't flow well. It is better to read sentences, figure out what is
being said, and to write that in the new language. Unfortunately,
this takes longer than the first approach until the person gets good at
it. As a side benefit, people using the second method catch more mistakes
and poor descriptions in the original.
--
James (Jay) Treacy
treacy@debian.org
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