[WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] [[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in English and another language?

[David Gerard]

On 21/09/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson at gmail.com> wrote:

> While I know using online translators is discouraged, if a person is
> familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations and to
> rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't
> necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something in
> the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another
> language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of
> articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it does a
> passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter. The
> nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the
> translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.


I've tried this. It's somewhat better than nothing. But mostly I've
only used it for expanding a bare stub and only in an area I'm already
familiar with, and even that's too painful to do much.


- d.