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It seems like I need help from one of my friends in the UK to get the Docs I posted about the other day. Several of you have already offered, and thank you very very much for that! It seems like the important thing, then, is how I can pay you back for the cost of shipping, boots being somewhat heavy. I think we need someone who has Paypal, since we can't exactly send a cashier's check, although of course, if you prefer we could order something for you of equal value. And of course we'd also need an address. So - anyone? Comment (or lj-msg, or email to my lj account) and we'll talk. I'll have to get a shipping address before I place the order, but that has to wait until Wax gets home anyway.
17 Sep 2008
I think the most maddening part of the Project That Pissed Me the Fuck Off is, okay, the reason you're not supposed to translate OUT of your native language is that you want the most natural, native-speaker-like translation.
That is to say, it's assumed that everyone has a more nuanced understanding of his or her native language. Which means that the theoretical advantage of having a translator translate out of their native language would be that their grasp of the source would be better.
I mean, so Norwegian Girl should theoretically have understood nuances of the Norwegian original that I might not have, if there were non-standard usages, colloquialisms, grammatical ambiguities - if the sentence could have multiple meanings or had a subtle mistake that makes it mean something wrong, like a misplaced modifier for example, then a native speaker should just naturally grasp it where I might not.
But Norwegian Girl's understanding of Norwegian is inferior to mine. And I don't actually speak Norwegian. I keep running across mistranslations that in no way can be attributed to her misunderstanding of how to form correct sentences in English, though she certainly does misunderstand this. I keep fixing sentences because she actually just didn't understand what the original sentence was saying - where she put the modifiers in the wrong place.
For example, here's her translation:
This sentence is grammatically correct aside from the incorrect capitalisation, although the end is clunky and would be rephrased, if it were what the sentence actually meant. But it isn't. What the sentence actually means is:
Confusion is introduced by the way Norwegian doesn't use 'the' and 'a(n)' the same way English does, which means when you read the Norwegian sentence you have to grasp from context whether the case is general (referring to all users - which it is) or specific (talking about a hypothetical individual user). The sentence means that you can set, for any and all individual users, whether or not they have permission to delete messages - not that you can pick any single user you like and enable them alone to delete. There is no 'who will be able to' construction, or anything like it, in the source. And this is simply one example.
So I'm not just correcting mistakes due to her wholly inadequate English, I'm not just correcting inadvertent 'That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means', but I'm also, for proofreader pay - 1/6th of her pay - compensating for the fact that she does not actually have sufficient reading comprehension skills in her native language to understand the import of the document in the first place, let alone to translate that meaning for anyone else.
That is to say, it's assumed that everyone has a more nuanced understanding of his or her native language. Which means that the theoretical advantage of having a translator translate out of their native language would be that their grasp of the source would be better.
I mean, so Norwegian Girl should theoretically have understood nuances of the Norwegian original that I might not have, if there were non-standard usages, colloquialisms, grammatical ambiguities - if the sentence could have multiple meanings or had a subtle mistake that makes it mean something wrong, like a misplaced modifier for example, then a native speaker should just naturally grasp it where I might not.
But Norwegian Girl's understanding of Norwegian is inferior to mine. And I don't actually speak Norwegian. I keep running across mistranslations that in no way can be attributed to her misunderstanding of how to form correct sentences in English, though she certainly does misunderstand this. I keep fixing sentences because she actually just didn't understand what the original sentence was saying - where she put the modifiers in the wrong place.
For example, here's her translation:
For Messages that are not to be stored in PROGRAM, a user can be designated who will be able to delete it or not.
This sentence is grammatically correct aside from the incorrect capitalisation, although the end is clunky and would be rephrased, if it were what the sentence actually meant. But it isn't. What the sentence actually means is:
For messages that are not to be stored in PROGRAM, one can indicate whether the user will be able to delete them or not.
Confusion is introduced by the way Norwegian doesn't use 'the' and 'a(n)' the same way English does, which means when you read the Norwegian sentence you have to grasp from context whether the case is general (referring to all users - which it is) or specific (talking about a hypothetical individual user). The sentence means that you can set, for any and all individual users, whether or not they have permission to delete messages - not that you can pick any single user you like and enable them alone to delete. There is no 'who will be able to' construction, or anything like it, in the source. And this is simply one example.
So I'm not just correcting mistakes due to her wholly inadequate English, I'm not just correcting inadvertent 'That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means', but I'm also, for proofreader pay - 1/6th of her pay - compensating for the fact that she does not actually have sufficient reading comprehension skills in her native language to understand the import of the document in the first place, let alone to translate that meaning for anyone else.