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| Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from? |
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| coppice:
--- Quote from: EPAIII on November 19, 2023, 07:42:36 am ---What I find most curious here is that the Chinese can actually read those characters at the scale that they appear on my computer screen. Either they have very sharp eyesight or they must have a different type font size setting on their computers. --- End quote --- Its just a matter of familiarity. I didn't start learning to read Chinese until I was about 40. Not knowing any, I started out needing every element of the character to be clearly defined. As I started to grasp what makes sense as part of a character and what doesn't my need for clarity relaxed. I can't cope with the level of poor clarity that my children, raised reading Chinese, can, but I have gradually expanded what I can read. Note: doctor's writing is very hard to read in any language. :) |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: EPAIII on November 19, 2023, 08:29:15 am ---A lot of this is centered around Chinese, but they do not have an exclusive on terminology differences and confusion. Back in the 80s I worked in a TV station when the Japanese companies, like Sony and Ikegami, started to make equipment sales to the US TV market. I am talking about professional equipment, not consumer. This equipment came with thick manuals where maintenance and set-up procedures were explained on a step by step basis. Often there would be two or more thick manuals for a given item of equipment so there was a lot in them. One such manual, translated from the original Japanese, that I recall had a cover title that immediately told you that you were going to have real problems understanding what was within. That title read, "Color Handi Lookie System". It was not unusual to see small groups of our TV engineering staff standing around for a half hour or longer trying to understand just one sentence or phrase in that manual. And the item of equipment was stuck on a maintenance bench until the meaning was figured out. With our people afraid of messing things up to where only the factory could fix it, procedures that should have taken only a few minutes, wound up taking all week. The translations did get better with later generations of equipment. I am sure there was some unpleasant feedback on that manual. PS: If you haven't figured it out, "Color Handi Lookie System" meant "Hand-Held, Color, TV Camera". --- End quote --- That was the period when native English speakers set up agencies in Japan, not to translate Japanese documentation into English, but to clean up the terrible translations a second language speaker had produced. I used to know someone who seemed to make very good money doing that. A native English speaker, with some technical proficiency, and very little ability to speak Japanese. Just enough to be able to question the original Japanese author and try to figure out what they really meant. :) |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: gamalot on November 19, 2023, 12:40:07 am ---"電單車" is a traditional Chinese term. In mainland Mandarin, motorcycle is transliterated as "摩托车". --- End quote --- True, but in conversation 電單車 gets contracted to 電車, and in HK you are often left wondering whether someone meant the tram service or a motorbike. |
| harerod:
--- Quote from: gamalot on November 19, 2023, 12:06:18 am ---... Even I as a native Chinese speaker can't find a reasonable explanation, but I know that the term "火" here means "electricity". Relatedly, in Chinese, the live wire is called "火线", literally means "fire wire". --- End quote --- Only through learning secondary languages one starts to see the quirks his mother tongue... Soo - how fast in Chinese fire wire? ;) Is there a rule to when 火 fire and when 電 lightning is used for electricity? Reading or meaning wise? How did the lightning end up in automobiles? Fiery and noisy? |
| harerod:
--- Quote from: coppice on November 19, 2023, 03:11:45 pm ---Quote from: EPAIII on Today at 09:29:15 A lot of this is centered around Chinese, but they do not have an exclusive on terminology differences and confusion. Back in the 80s I worked in a TV station when the Japanese companies, like Sony and Ikegami, started to make equipment sales to the US TV market. I am talking about professional equipment, not consumer. This equipment came with thick manuals where maintenance and set-up procedures were explained on a step by step basis. Often there would be two or more thick manuals for a given item of equipment so there was a lot in them. One such manual, translated from the original Japanese, that I recall had a cover title that immediately told you that you were going to have real problems understanding what was within. That title read, "Color Handi Lookie System". It was not unusual to see small groups of our TV engineering staff standing around for a half hour or longer trying to understand just one sentence or phrase in that manual. And the item of equipment was stuck on a maintenance bench until the meaning was figured out. With our people afraid of messing things up to where only the factory could fix it, procedures that should have taken only a few minutes, wound up taking all week. The translations did get better with later generations of equipment. I am sure there was some unpleasant feedback on that manual. PS: If you haven't figured it out, "Color Handi Lookie System" meant "Hand-Held, Color, TV Camera". --- End quote --- That was the period when native English speakers set up agencies in Japan, not to translate Japanese documentation into English, but to clean up the terrible translations a second language speaker had produced. I used to know someone who seemed to make very good money doing that. A native English speaker, with some technical proficiency, and very little ability to speak Japanese. Just enough to be able to question the original Japanese author and try to figure out what they really meant. :) --- End quote --- Honestly - that sounds like my dream job. I offer technical translations into my native German and into English from several languages (e.g. Japanese, French). Most of the time I would be deemed too expensive. However, quite often good technical documentation is a must. Back in the 1980's was the time when I started collecting interesting translations. Documentation wording had to endure several hops, before it arrived in, for lack of a better word, German. We imagined how that text had started out in Korean, was then translated into Japanese, from there to English and finally to German. From the top of my head, some nice examples: -> a calculator able to work with "Zauberzahlen" (magic numbers, 0..F, you know?) -> that wonderful device could also figure out the "eingebildeten" components (conceited, from double meaning of the German word for "imaginery") of "komplizierten Zahlen" ("complicated Numbers" complex) From a monitor manual we had a whole load of gems like: -> don't water the technical equipment -> do gruesomely abuse not by walk on power cord (German text was: "niemals wandeln auf Stromkabel um grausam misshandeln") You get the idea, same as DNA got, when he gave Dirk Gently that I-Ching calculator. |
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