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dbannon:
Nimal, how about this page - https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Examples_Window
I am virtually the only contributor so no one to offend, translate it to German and then read it and see if it still makes some sense. When you have done that, I will get a translation back to English (but not publish it) and see if I recognize my words sufficiently ?
Please note, the post, in my name, a couple of posts up from here is not my post. :o
Davo
trev:
--- Quote from: dbannon on February 02, 2022, 12:53:30 am ---Please note, the post, in my name, a couple of posts up from here is not my post. :o
--- End quote ---
My mistake - I must have accidentally hit Modify with the mouse rather than Quote which is just to the left of Modify. Sorry. The resulting edit window is no different for quote/modify. If I knowingly modify a post I always include the reason "[Edited to add code tags...]" for example.
ArminLinder:
--- Quote from: dbannon on February 02, 2022, 12:53:30 am ---Nimal, how about this page - https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Examples_Window
I am virtually the only contributor so no one to offend, translate it to German and then read it and see if it still makes some sense. When you have done that, I will get a translation back to English (but not publish it) and see if I recognize my words sufficiently ?
Please note, the post, in my name, a couple of posts up from here is not my post. :o
Davo
--- End quote ---
Done! And it looks great!
I did intentionally not read the English text, and shoved the page through Google Translate. Later this evening I will also give DeepL a try.
This is my opinion: most translated content, say 95%, does make perfect sense. A native German speaker could hardly have done any better.
The remaining 5% consists of maybe 4% which I'd rate "hard to read" in a sense that I need to think about what the author wanted to tell me, because the translation engine put sentences together in an ususual way, but once I thought about it a little bit the meaning was clear. The content does not send the reader off into a wrong direction, so it is still helpful, but the extra efforts to "decypher" distracts from the problem one needs to solve. In German we say "the text bumps".
Approx 1%, meaning 1 sentence out of 100, translates to b***shit.
It would be interesting to see, if I make some minor changes to the English text, whether I can resolve the 1% entirely, and reduce the 4% significiantly, without affecting the quality of the English original.
May I try? I could do it in the Wiki, and you could revert the changes later if you don't like them.
Armin.
dbannon:
Yes, I think you should. Make a German version of it, don't manually edit anything so we can see it warts and all. I'll then take that German copy and convert it back (but not publish on the wiki as its redundant) just to see how readable it is.
Some time ago we had a panel game here on TV where they were doing this and the contestants had to try and figure what the (very short) document said originally, sounds like the translation systems work a lot better now.
Davo
ArminLinder:
--- Quote from: dbannon on February 03, 2022, 12:25:49 am ---Some time ago we had a panel game here on TV where they were doing this and the contestants had to try and figure what the (very short) document said originally, sounds like the translation systems work a lot better now.
--- End quote ---
I think they indeed got far better. Back in the days of Microsoft's old MSDN, machine translations were dreaded in Germany, because the translations were barely making any sense, unless one got used to kind of "translator slang" and got able to rearrange the translated contents in his mind while reading. Not to mention the numerous errors sending one off in a completely wrong direction, wasting countless hours of labour time. Usually they were not caused by the translation but by glitches in the English original. My impression was that the translators had no clue what they were translating.
I was especially pleased to see that Google Translate picked up that the page I tested with was about computing, and thus did no longer translate "Thread" to "Gewinde", which is the German word for what you cut on bolts to become screws. And as I have tried on the page about daemons and services, putting "notranslate" tags around the code section keeps that from beeing translated, and I was prepared to do it for technical terms too, it was a relief to see that the translator did that by itself.
I did then, unfortunately, run into a problem providing the source code in one contiguous file (not having to provide .lfm files), I changed the code to run without, but that did, in my opinion, screw up the whole page totally. Another "enforced" mistake was to post the final thing, which got rather long because I had to add significant code to get Windows and Linux work the exactly same way. Furthermore the main part doesn't match the code sample given any more, since I had to switch from GUI components to programmed initializon. Now I have reached my "one running out of the box" goal, but the page turned out ugly and barely readable.
I hope Davo's sample code repo gains momentum soon, I will then happily revert all that stuff, put only snippets into the wiki, move the extensive comments into the text body, and provide a link to the repo right at the beginning for those programmers who do read code easier than written text.
After having been really frustrated by the materials provided by the Lazarus community, I do see thing unfold into a very pleasant direction, and I am very pleased to be a part of it :-)
Armin.
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