- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Still, on balance, I think I will replace http://www.eurotrib.com/user/Frank%20Schnittger/diary in my e-mail signature with http://tinyurl.com/FrankSchnittger for the time being. Vote McCain for war without gain
(Running Firefox with the ET-extensions on XP.)
All George W did was order a camera angle from the satellite that made it look like it was heading to France. Camera angles, that he understands. Trajectories and which direction the earth orbits, not so much. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Stylistically though, if I used a picture up of east Asia and a asteroid about to hit, then many casual observers would wonder why Europe is Doomed™ when there's a picture of China there?
So one solution is to make an explicit statement in the new user guide that perfect or even good English is not required. We will try and make sense of what people are saying and respond empathetically.
The other solution is the Tribext- machine translation engine - its a good first cut approximation and usually fully understandable if not quite as nuanced as it could be.
A third solution is simply to encourage comments in other languages. The problem here is that they may be very few e.g. German speakers on line at any point in time to carry on a conversation.
Even Timesonline's Charles' Bremner encourages comments in French - and that is an issue we have to address in the context of the development of the ET community in any case. Vote McCain for war without gain
Maybe powinne start komentowac in English. I am sure with All zrozumieja me. Wyscie all teach the Polish August at school - it is very pozyteczny language. No, it can and so is not a good idea. Zastanowie August.
Hmmm, either the translator is not very good in Polish, the original text is full of orthographical mistakes, or without a human reading it, those translations really aren't very useful. Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
Maybe I should start commenting in Polish. I'm sure everyone will understand me. You all studied Polish in school - after all, it's a very useful language. Hmmh, maybe it's not such a good idea. I'll think about it.
The classical example of this, now fixed, was the translation of Sarkozy (French) into Blair (English).
I would say that the lack of diacritical marks was an issue except it seems to do fine with some words. Take the first sentence: everything except the last two words has marks. 'Zaczac' even has two and it got it right. And translating 'No' as no is pretty strange, as is 'uczyli sie' as 'teach all of August'.
Or in other words the translation program sucks.
I did the test a while back, translating some random bits from newspapers. One can for the most part understand what is written, and easily improve it to standard English. The program seems to get worse for other languages. With Swedish, for example, one may as well not bother...
You know if you look reately at the sitemeter map, there should be actually quite a few people from the German speaking area, but very few of them are commenting. And I don't think answers have to be posted instantaneoudly. Some people comment in older diaries and keep that discussion alive.
