[Foundation-l] Translations fundraising.wikimedia.org

[habj]

2006/12/22, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com>:

> 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.

IMHO we are splitting hairs. Of course there exists lists of words
that are simple enough that they can be translated with only a
dictionary! (and some context, or you can not use the explanation and
notes in your dictionary). The question is how common these cases are,
and I'd say that partly depends on how afraid you are of silly
mistakes. One might realise that when put in context, the simple word
has the wrong grammatical form... since the language one translates
from does not distinguish between these two etc. etc. ad nauseam.

I've translated MediaWiki messages "blindly". It often worked OK, some
had to be tweaked when we discovered where they were used. That was no
big deal. In PR material, such as this fundraising stuff, silly
mistakes look much worse. I think this discussion still somehow hovers
around the topic of C.O.R.E. and to me it is clear that a translation
with just a dictionary would be less satisfactory, so that correct
English in most cases is a better alternative.

/habj