RE: French Terms

[Joel Fritz <JFritz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One of life's little pleasures is feeding incoherent memos through Babelfish
twice. You'd be surprised how interesting memos on work area neatness or job
postings become when mechanically translated into a different language and
back into the original language.

I wouldn't expect a translation program to be very effective on idioms or
technical jargon.   

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kahn, David [JNJFR] [mailto:DKahn1@JNJFR.JNJ.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 1999 12:10 AM
> To: 'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com'
> Subject: RE: French Terms
> 
> 
> I'd be extremely wary of using translations from Babelfish. 
> For example,
> "exit point" and "exit program" have been interpreted in the 
> imperative. So
> "quittez le point" and "quittez le programme" mean "leave the 
> point" and
> "leave the program" respectively.
> 
> These types of translations are quite difficult even if your 
> French is good
> and you have a French colleague with good English sitting 
> with you. You
> really need to look at native examples in the context you're using. As
> another example of the problems involved, IBM translates 
> "remote command" as
> "commande à distance" but "remote definitions" as 
> "définitions éloignées".
> 
> And if you really want to expose the shortcomings of 
> Babelfish try pasting
> in some text (this posting would do nicely), let Babelfish 
> translate it into
> French, then get it to render it's own translation back into English.
> Babelfish is great for a quick and free but very rough 
> rendering into your
> native language, but hopeless for anything more ambitious.
> 
> Dave Kahn
> Johnson & Johnson International (Ethicon) France
> Phone : +33 1 55 00 3180
> Email :  dkahn1@jnjfr.jnj.com (work)
>          dkahn@cix.co.uk      (home)
> 
> 
> 
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