Re: [9fans] Re: [hangar18-general] Re: Questions about translating Plan 9 license

[Boyd Roberts <boyd@strakt.com>]

Chris Nystrom wrote:
> Why not use babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/) to do a sort of
> alpha version of a translation to get started, and you could post it, and
> people could be amused and then submit corrections and the document could
> be improved from there on an evolutionary basis?

The trouble would be that machine translation would obliterate the original
meaning, rendering such stepwise refinement useless.  Machine translation is
difficult enough for fairly ordinary constructs and translation of technical
documents is considerably harder.

If we take the above paragraph and transmogrify it into French (with babelfish):

    Pourquoi est-ce que pas le babelfish d'utilisation

Word for word dictionary translation, where 'pourquoi pas utiliser le
babelfish ...' would be better.

    (http://babelfish.altavista.com/) une sorte de
    version d'alpha d'une traduction obtiennent
    commencée,

More dictionary stuff with d[e]'... constructs and weird use of the 3rd person
plural [obtiennent] in some attempt at the passive?

    et vous pourrait la signaler,

Is this strange use of the conditional 'qqn vous pourrait' or 'vous pourriez'?
It's probably the latter, because of 'pourrait la signaler'.

    et les gens pourraient-ils s'amuser et soumettre alors les
    corrections et le document pourrait-elle être
    améliorée de là sur une base évolutionnaire?

Total gender confusion with 'le document' suddenly being smashed into
use as a feminine noun by 'pourrait-elle être améliorée', complete with
gratuitous verbosity.

The whole thing is just unreadable.

Mark V Shaney could probably do a better job.