RE: French Terms

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)
> 
> 
> 
+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---