Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Advice on translating large Odt documents

       ah, yes, and that's another reason I dis-like acronymns ... they can
be mis-interpreted as typos  ;-)

       BTW - I see you too have discovered FireFox' add-ons ... ... ...
[way too many to count]

       You also brought up a very important point in translating - thanks!
            jokes, puns, ... any play-on-words should be avoided, if
possible, due to the embarrassing situations which may occur.
       This is one of the reasons, many foreigners find English a
complicated language to learn - where we (English) get confused remembering
what gender objects are  ;-)
            [it can be sometimes quite amusing to watch translators,
including signers - try it sometime when you have a moment  ;-)  ]



From: Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 1:49 AM
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Advice on translating large Odt documents
To: Adolfo Jayme Barrientos <fito@libreoffice.org>, anne-ology <
laginnis@gmail.com>
Cc: Sophie Gautier <gautier.sophie@gmail.com>, "l10n@global.libreoffice.org"
<l10n@global.libreoffice.org>


Hi :)
Ahh, i thought it was a typo for MT = Machine Translator

Firefox has a lot of different add-ons that are quite good MTs.  Quite a
few combine Google Translate with various other engines. My current
favourite is "Quick Translate" but for ages i used "Foxlingo" and "IM
Translate" but there are others.

In LibreOffice or OpenOffice got to
Tools - Options - Internet - "Browser Plugin"
and tick the box in order to open ODF documents in a web-browser.  Then
when you try to open the file or download it then it opens in the
web-browser.  If you want to open a local file (on one your machine) or
even on your network file-shares then you can right-click and choose "Open
With ..." and then choose to open the document in a web-browser.

With "Quick Translate" when select an area or block of text or even a
single word a spinning globe appears near the start of the selected text.
 Clicking on that starts a spinning wheel in the bottom right and that
eventually brings up a translation.  You can change the default language it
translates into and the MT usually correctly guesses the language used in
the web-page.


However i am sure everyone has examples of situations that MTs can't
handle.  One stupid example is a story/joke in my country.
"A man and a giraffe went into a pub and both got very drunk.  The giraffe
tripped over and fell asleep.  The man started to walk out the pub but the
barman said "You can't leave that layin' there".  The man said "It's not a
lion.  It's a giraffe" and left".  In normal speech people often use
contractions so "laying" ends up sounding like "lion" but it also sounds
like lying.  So now if someone accuses someone else of telling an untruth
then another person might try to diffuse the tension by saying "It's not a
lion it's a giraffe".  If the 1st person had wanted to avoid the tension
then they would have accused the person of telling a giraffe, as in "that's
a giraffe" or they might say "Pull the other one" (or the more complete
"Pull the other one it's got bells on") in reference to a bizarre pagan
ritual which has been trivialised over the centuries to the point of
becoming a joke.

One US president went to visit a certain war-torn city and wanted to say
that he felt so much sympathy / empathy for their plight that he felt he
almost was one of them.  Unfortunately he mispronounced it slightly and
ended up saying something like
"I am a small sausage"
So now when someone claims to be an inhabitant of anywhere they might
accidentally (or deliberately) say it in such a way that various people
laugh at the hinted reference although many people probably don't remember
the original story, but might still find it amusing without really knowing
why.

There are some "not so funny" (means exactly the opposite of funny)
examples such as when you finally get to an answer and solve a problem
there is one combination of words that was the code-name of an "operation"
to commit genocide.  A human translator would carefully avoid the phrase or
quickly rearrange the words possibly resulting in something that looks
clunky to people "with perfect English".

Sometimes stories spring up in certain groups or at certain times and then
might vanish shortly after or might so swiftly become so deeply embedded
within the language that not using them looks clunky.  We now have "txtin
language" (no e otherwise it changes the meaning) and 24/7 and a verb,
"mobile" has become a noun.


Machine translators are never going to be able to keep up with all of them
because some appear and vanish too fast or are too subtle or has too many
nuances some of which may have more or less strength due to context or
recent events in the world.  Humans don't always keep up either but are
more likely to have a good gut-feeling about which are worth avoiding in
certain situations.

Regards from
Tom :)




  On Saturday, 12 October 2013, 1:39, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos <
fito@libreoffice.org> wrote:
 On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:52 PM, anne-ology <laginnis@gmail.com> wrote:

>        I don't know what the TradeMark [ what else is TM ??? ] is, but it


“TM” stands for Translation Memory. :-)

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