Oppolzer - Informatik / Blog

Very true. Some 20 years ago I knew some guys here in Germany - friends of mine
- who were unemployed teachers at that time (they studied languages to get a job
as a teacher at colleges, which are not private in Germany, but managed by the
state, but government didn't need them all). So they were hired by IBM and other
tech companies to translate brochures, but they had no knowledge about the
subjects (for example computer science) at all. Well: some of them had, but some
had not.

The results were horrible, in some cases.

I don't even know, if it is sufficient to check the translation - after it has
been done by such a person - by another one who knows about the subject. Maybe a
team of two persons - one with translation skills and and another person, who
knows about the subject and knows the target language - would work.

Another story:

Recently, I had to do PL/1 classes in english for co-workers from India, and my
German handouts had to be translated to english. I couldn't do it myself, so
they were passed to a translation bureau which translated them to english.
Apparently they, too, had no knowledge of PL/1 and computer science. So I had to
correct the strongest errors while doing the class - this was not easy, but in
the end it worked and the class was successful. In fact, the class was not about
PL/1; the folks from India knew a bit about PL/1, but about the peculiarities of
our installation (site-specific macros, coding conventions, calling methods,
parameter passing, tracing, DLLs and so on).

Kind regards

Bernd



Am 21.02.2013 08:22, schrieb M.T.:
> Thread shift- now: translation
>
>>> They should never be done by anyone of not a native speaker of the
>>> target language and at least a near-native speaker of English.
> I like to add - and should know the subject. A book on programming in
> COBOL should be done by someone that has done some COBOL-programming
> and so on.
>
> To avoid things that J. cited in italian or
>
> "Die Umgebungspaltung ist ebenso vorgeschrieben und hat feste Inhalte."
>
> --
> M.
>