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| Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from? |
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| TimFox:
--- Quote from: adeuring on November 05, 2022, 07:22:31 pm ---Here is a sentence from the English manual of an alarm system that was probably originally written in German: (https://mobil.abus.com/Privat/Alarmsysteme/Terxon-Draht-System/Zentrale-Alarmierung/Zentrale/Terxon-SX-Alarmzentrale ): "Define entry delay time 25.40 mm seconds." (page 136 in the linked PDF file) IMHO, this tops the really interesting observations from vk6zgo about English manuals from German vendors. The German text gives a clue: "Legen Sie die Eingangsverzögerungszeit 1 in Sekunden fest." (page 66) If "25.4mm" is replaced with "in", the English sentence majes more sense: "Define entry delay time in seconds". But how on earth could it happen that "in" was translated as "25.4 mm"? Sure, one inch equals 25.4 mm. But the assumption that the letters "in" in the German text could be an acronym for "inch" is just insane: * The German word for "inch" is "Zoll". While Germans like to adopt English words, "inch" is, to the best of my knowledge (German is my native language), not among those "adopted" words. * If I replace "in" with "Zoll" in the German text ("Legen Sie die Eingangsverzögerungszeit 1 Zoll in Sekunden fest.") reading the sentence leads to the same mental parsing error as reading the English translation. * It is very uncommon in German to use imperial units. How could the translator – be it a human or a translation program – get the idea that a German text would specify a value in inch and then translate that value into a metric one for a language where imperial units are more common? And this is not the only error in this manual. Some texts in the grey boxes of the drawings on pages 91 (English manual) and 15 (German manual) are cut off, for example. In this case, the English drawing is slightly more informative than the German. --- End quote --- Machine translation! In US "customary units", the abbreviation for "inch" is "in", and "foot" is "ft". |
| adeuring:
--- Quote from: TimFox on November 05, 2022, 08:06:59 pm ---Machine translation! In US "customary units", the abbreviation for "inch" is "in", and "foot" is "ft". --- End quote --- Yeah, it could be a machine error. But then it seems that this machine has no clue about abbreviations that are common in a German text and simply assumes that any English abbreviation can easily occur there… |
| TimFox:
Clueless machinery is a world-wide problem. On the other hand, when I studied German at age 16, I was told that German university students would read Immanuel Kant's works in standard English translations, which was easier to understand. |
| coppice:
--- Quote from: vk6zgo on July 24, 2022, 01:22:32 am ---Strange translations are not confined to English/Chinese & vice versa, even related languages like French/ English & German/English have brought forth their share of "howlers". The English translations of original French manuals I used to work with had some seriously inventive efforts which made them really hard to decipher --- End quote --- In the 70s, ST's data sheets (Thomson in those days) were often hilariously mistranslated into English. |
| Bud:
There was something weird in all German documentation that I came across several years back which was either written or translated by German tech staff. I can't explain, but you have that "..not sure what is going on... " feeling as you read it. They have their style ,so to speak, writing technical documentation, which did not flow smooth with me. It was noticably different from north american technical documentation style that we were used to. Not saying here it was bad, it was just different. |
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