General > General Technical Chat
Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from?
pdenisowski:
--- Quote from: harerod on November 19, 2023, 08:12:38 pm --- 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.
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I did translation work to support myself (financially) when I was working on my engineering degree: it wasn't great money even back then, but it paid (some of) the bills. Technical translation jobs always paid better than non-technical jobs :)
This was (long) before machine translation, electronic dictionaries, Google translate, etc. I haven't done translation work in a long time, but I can't imagine trying to make a living doing it now. Some of the AI translation tools are frighteningly good, even for more obscure languages or technical topics.
My feeling is that in the future, translation as a profession will be limited primarily to books / literature, where you really need a human translator for style, nuance, etc.
(I actually did translate an entire book once: https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sil_1089190)
harerod:
--- Quote from: pdenisowski on November 26, 2023, 03:25:36 am ---Quote from: harerod on 2023-11-17, 19:25:23
pdenisowski, first of all - thanks for your effort. Out of curiosity - have you met Jim Breen? He is a hero for many students of Japanese.
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Jim and I go way, way back (early 1990s). In fact, I think I was Jim's first friend on Facebook :)
I was a contributor to EDICT and Jim eventually folded my COMPDIC (Japanese-English computer dictionary) file into his main EDICT file
http://nihongo.monash.edu/compdic_doc.html
Jim was also one of my heroes when I was studying Japanese (using a Canon Wordtank and a beat up copy of Nelson's dictionary) :)
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Wow, reading your reply gave me goosebumps. Without the aid of a computer and the free resources available online, learning any Japanese would most likely have been beyond my capabilities. I certainly noticed COMPDIC inside JMDICT, being an EE myself. Those collections are the foundation for tools that I use daily, such as Rikaichamp, Yomichan and Jisho.org, to name a few examples.
I'd like to thank you again for your effort.
I learn Japanese via English, simply because of the quality of the available material. Nevertheless, here's a link to a collection of my notes regarding Japanese in German, which mostly quotes sources in English or Japanese. http://www.harerod.de/nihongo/index.html
harerod:
--- Quote from: pdenisowski on November 26, 2023, 03:38:51 am ---... on translations ...
... Ernst Messerschmid ...
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Well, I am offering technical translations, because of all the hilarious stuff that I have seen. The output from professional technical translation services must be checked, if one wants to avoid embarrassment. As can be seen not only in this thread...
Learning a language is about understanding your foreign partner. Something that a translation tool cannot do for humans. I appreciate modern tools, but I see them as an extension to the basic abilities of a human being.
I also appreciate the effort of all those guys who use their L2-English, rather than Google Translate, to contribute to this forum.
I am pretty sure that I read this book in German. Messerschmid / Furrer, those names were well known to nerdy German kids back in 1985. STS-61-A, the penultimate flight of OV-099 Challenger.
soldar:
--- Quote from: janoc on July 24, 2022, 08:54:58 am ---
--- Quote from: niconiconi on July 21, 2022, 08:24:49 pm ---Welding, soldering and blazing are not distinguished outside technical fields, all metal-joining techniques are known as "焊接" or "焊". Hence the mistranslation.
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That's the same in French, for example.
To weld or to solder is both translated the same: "souder".
So if you hope to buy a soldering iron/station, don't ask for a "machine à souder" at your local hardware store or Conrad or you will be shown a welder :-// (soldering iron is "fer à souder" - literally "iron for welding/soldering").
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Same in Spanish. Weld, braze, solder and sometimes even "glue" are "soldar", from latin solidus, to make solid.
Most people do not realize how the language you speak conditions your perception of the world. But words are not single points with a one to one correspondence in other languages. Each word covers some area and that area can be covered by different words in another language and viceversa. Each word has a lot fo connotations and relations that it may not have in another language.
An english-speaking person might thing it is strange that another language does not distinguish between welding, brazing and soldering and use the same word for all three.
A native Spanish speaker might think it is strange that English speakers use the word "wall" for what in Spanish we distinguish many different categories. City walls, garden walls, load bearing walls, non-load bearing walls, retaining walls, etc. are just all "walls" in English.
A common example is colors. Where one culture sees two different colors another culture sees two shades of the same color. Also the separation of two colors may exist in different points. Where does a mixture of blue-green become green?
We have light blue and dark (navy) blue and consider them two shades of the same color. And yet we see dark orange and call it brown and consider it a different color altogether.
soldar:
English as she is spoke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
English as She Is Spoke, is a 19th-century book written by Pedro Carolino, with some editions crediting José da Fonseca as a co-author. It was intended as a Portuguese–English conversational guide or phrase book. However, because the provided translations are usually inaccurate or unidiomatic, it is regarded as a classic source of unintentional humour in translation.
The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation, which has led to many idiomatic expressions being translated ineptly. For example, Carolino translates the Portuguese phrase chover a cântaros as "raining in jars", when an analogous English idiom is available in the form of "raining buckets".
Mark Twain said of English as She Is Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.
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