Re: Changing the language of gnus menu entries

[Dale Snell]

On 26 Sep 2013 04:05:27 GMT
Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com> wrote:

I can't really contribute much to this discussion, since I'm a
native speaker of (American) English, and have only a smattering
of other languages.  However, I do have a couple of observations.

> Rather than think, let's do a little experiment. For fun, I tried
> translating a bit of Japanese. Taking the third paragraph from
> <http://cx4a.org/pub/emacs-is-dead.ja.html> (after the header "Emacsの思
> 想") and feeding it to Google Translate produces the following:
> 
> ,----
> | And I should say first, but the "thought of Emacs" to speak here is
> | what I personally made ​​up on its own. I have never as far as I know, I
> | saw no one from telling "thought of Emacs", including Stallman. It will
> | place for such Stallman continues to exercise toward the "spirit of
> | freedom" is a great more his goal in particular, and said not to Ganchu
> | small problem of such "thought of Emacs". I want to say anyway, is that
> | ideological value is significantly lower because no one is sponsored by.
> | Please take care only that point.
> `----
> 
> Which is complete gibberish to me. Not a coherent thought in sight.

To be honest, that looks like something that was machine
translated in both directions.  Yikes!

I suspect that a native Japanese speaker would understand text
translated from English to Japanese better than a native English
speaker would understand Japanese translated to English.  Japanese
is extremely difficult for (human) Western translators to get right
because Japanese is so very dependent on context.  Much more so
than other languages that I have any knowledge of.  It's hard for
me to see a machine getting it right.  No translation program I've
encuntered had any sense of context.

> I once tried to find the German equivalent for the Arabic term «waziir
> al-wuzaraa'» ('council of ministers') using Google Translate and was
> baffled to see it translated as "Schrank" ('cupboard, closet')... I'll
> leave it up to the reader to figure out around which corner Google was
> thinking there. ;-)

I think I've got an answer to this one.  A "council of ministers" is
also known as a "cabinet".  A different kind of cabinet can also be
called a "cupboard" or (maybe) a "closet".  Again, no sense of context.
Hence the odd translation.

--Dale

--
Vir: "I thought the purpose of filing these reports was to provide
      accurate intelligence."
Londo:  "Vir, intelligence has nothing to do with politics."
    --  "Babylon 5" episode, "Point of No Return"