RE: [Flightgear-devel] Localizaiton of FlightGear

[Michael B. <pm...@je...>]

Dear Arndt,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fli...@li...
> [mailto:fli...@li...]On Behalf Of Arnt
> Karlsen
> Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 9:32 PM
> To: fli...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Localizaiton of FlightGear

> ..if we take advantage of the translation work done on the 4
> Geneva Conventions, we can have another 130+ languages available.
> We'd first need to generate language pair filters.
> Database job, I believe.  Could chop the texts down into
> first individual articles, then cut down these into
> individual sentences, then subsentences and words,
> until singular meanings are lost.

I am not quite sure what you're speaking on. However, working as a technical
translator for a living, I am very skeptical on any automatic translation
tool. I once tested one by Langenscheidt, and the result was plainly
unusable. Not to speak about Babelfish etc.

My suggestion (and I once did a little bit of software localization):
Programmers should extract the relevant strings into a few ASCII files.
Afterwards "ordinary" people like you and me and perhaps 128+ from other
countries who speak (sort of) English plus another language can do and
maintain (which IMHO is the more demanding job) the translations.

Regards, Michael


-------------------------------------------------------
    Michael Basler, Jena, Germany
             pm...@ep...
  http://www.geocities.com/pmb.geo/