[Foundation-l] Translations fundraising.wikimedia.org

Sam Korn smoddy at gmail.com
Fri Dec 22 13:34:09 UTC 2006


On 12/22/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22/12/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > [reorganising thread for readability]
>
> > Well, from my experience with translating to and from Latin, Greek,
> > French and German, a good dictionary will contain notes on usage that
> > should suffice here.
>
> These are all Indo-European languages. Translating across language
> families which are less likely to share common cultural assumptions
> and practices can be far more problematic I imagine.

I doubt that will make a difference, as I only used the notes that
were in English to help me.  Provided that a Thai dictionary, for
instance, has similar quality notes (and this is a good but not
exceptional dictionary) I see no reason why this should be impossible.

Yes, a knowledge of the language and culture is helpful.  But it's not
completely impossible to manage without for these simple phrases.

-- 
Sam



More information about the wikimedia-l mailing list