From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3CDFD4D8.A96B1FB7@strakt.com> From: Boyd Roberts MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: [hangar18-general] Re: Questions about translating Plan 9 license References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 16:59:36 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8fee93d4-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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, a= nd > people could be amused and then submit corrections and the document cou= ld > be improved from there on an evolutionary basis? The trouble would be that machine translation would obliterate the origin= al meaning, rendering such stepwise refinement useless. Machine translation= is difficult enough for fairly ordinary constructs and translation of techni= cal documents is considerably harder. If we take the above paragraph and transmogrify it into French (with babe= lfish): 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 commenc=E9e, More dictionary stuff with d[e]'... constructs and weird use of the 3rd p= erson 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 pourr= iez'? 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 =EAtre am=E9lior=E9e de l=E0 sur une base =E9volutionnaire? Total gender confusion with 'le document' suddenly being smashed into use as a feminine noun by 'pourrait-elle =EAtre am=E9lior=E9e', complete = with gratuitous verbosity. The whole thing is just unreadable. Mark V Shaney could probably do a better job.