Re: usability and i18n

[Fatih Demir <fdemir2 ix urz uni-heidelberg de>]

On Wed, 2002-07-31 at 12:21, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
[...]
> Speakers of some languages are lucky that their language is big enough so
> that companies (Sun)  want to make professional-level translations for
> those languages. Dutch is not such a language so the work is done by a
> loose bunch of volunteers in their free time.

Hi Reinout,

just wanted to state a small point in here: unfortunately this hasn't
got to do sooo much with the "size" or spread rate of a language,
especially for Turkish we can give a contra example. It's the sixth most
widely spoken language in the world with all of it's subsets, but I fear
we will never see an official translation by Sun or any bigger computer
company for it -- it's all about market services and such :-(

(/me doesn't want to say, "oh how bad is the world!" or something like
that, just want to say, that even widely spoken languages are
just-volunteers' work; in Turkish we're pure volunteering people and I
guess our translation rate isn't that bad for such a completely
volunteering-based project [we don't have a real "professional"
translator in our language team AFAIK]).

> They do the translations to the best of their abilities but can't be
> expected to always know how other translators translated specific words in
> specific contexts, or to look everything up in a (sometimes not even existing) glossary.

Well, some even don't know about a glossary -- though it exists for long
times, heh. Out of interest, are there great dictionaries for other
langauges available on the internet from a "languages' curatorium" (or
how it may be named then...)? Me just knows of a Turkish one yet which
"surprises me quite much" ;-)

> Programs like gTranslator offer a Translation Memory feature which may help,
> but just as often offers a wrong suggestion. All this, unfortunately, leads to
> inconsistent and incomplete translations and thus reduced usability.

Hmm, AI isn't integrated in gtranslator, so it's a pure idiotic computer
program -- it puts out, what you've managed to teach to it via letting
it learn previous translations. In this case I doubt if even more
professional translation memories do feature a "better" or "better
fitting" translation per se? Just some Euro cents in here (have too much
in here, makes the pants quite heavy, heh ;-))...
-- 
Fatih Demir <fdemir2@ix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Faculty of Biology -- Student