Farblegarg!
Mar. 27th, 2013 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpWinston Churchill is credited with saying "Never, never, never give up!" To which I am tempted to add a parallel thought, along the lines of "never" assuming that engineers in a bilateral (bilingual) project will have the same passion for accuracy as the translator.
(There's that curs't "assume" word, again. Hanging out like a gob of snot on a doorknob, with the attendant subtext of being unpleasant to consider, yet a thing that—properly arrayed—may be used, from time to time. But I digress...)
Some time ago, I ran across an equipment designation in a Russian source text that had the letter 'С' in it. Now, it so happens that both English and Russian have letters in their respective alphabets that look like 'С', but in English translations, such Russian designations are almost always transliterated (a process by which Cyrillic letters are replaced with English sound-alikes), in which case the 'С' is rendered as an 'S'.
Except that now it turns out the Russian equipment designation is actually the Latin letter 'C' (as in: the letter after 'B' and before 'D'). So all those transliterated designations, with 'S', are... um... wrong.
(The trick of searching for a particular Latin or Cyrillic letter to see if a letter in a designation is one or the other is not entirely reliable, as it turns out, because it requires the source document originator to care enough to switch keyboards so as to type the correct letter. And that is far from a sure thing, these days.)
Funny how nobody has noticed this incorrect designation before... or has it been noticed and simply not brought to anyone's attention?
(There's that curs't "assume" word, again. Hanging out like a gob of snot on a doorknob, with the attendant subtext of being unpleasant to consider, yet a thing that—properly arrayed—may be used, from time to time. But I digress...)
Some time ago, I ran across an equipment designation in a Russian source text that had the letter 'С' in it. Now, it so happens that both English and Russian have letters in their respective alphabets that look like 'С', but in English translations, such Russian designations are almost always transliterated (a process by which Cyrillic letters are replaced with English sound-alikes), in which case the 'С' is rendered as an 'S'.
Except that now it turns out the Russian equipment designation is actually the Latin letter 'C' (as in: the letter after 'B' and before 'D'). So all those transliterated designations, with 'S', are... um... wrong.
(The trick of searching for a particular Latin or Cyrillic letter to see if a letter in a designation is one or the other is not entirely reliable, as it turns out, because it requires the source document originator to care enough to switch keyboards so as to type the correct letter. And that is far from a sure thing, these days.)
Funny how nobody has noticed this incorrect designation before... or has it been noticed and simply not brought to anyone's attention?
