A chilling realization...
Mar. 24th, 2002 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpHere's another one:
ПУНКТ(ИЗДЕЛИЕ) нет
It's a heading in a table column, and should read something like "Item No." Instead, it's saying "Point(Article) no," which may not seem that far off, until I tell you that what corresponds to "no" in the original Russian ("нет") is the word that is the opposite of "yes."
So there I am, staring at my screen and feeling like an idiot, because I can't figure out what that "нет" is doing there.. and then it hits me!
This document (a request for a quote) contains material that has been machine-translated from English to Russian! The original English "Item No." was translated mindlessly, and the "No." was not parsed as the abbreviation for "number," but as "no" (as in "the-opposite-of-yes").
Ye gods.
Once it was "translated," the document was modified to reflect a Russian response to the RFQ, returned to the U.S., and then sent (eventually) to me for translation.
This would account for the numerous parenthetical inserts in the text (one is shown above), as the machine translation software(program) tried(attempted) to do a workchiplike job of offering(providing) suitable(appropriate) alternatives(variants) while rendering its translation, albeit at the expense of readability, I'm afraid.
Yech!
Depending on your point of view, I am either really, really screwed (I haven't much experience rendering back-translations of stuff spit out by a machine), or really, really liberated (anything I write, pretty much, I can't be faulted for).
Oh, well...
Cheers...
ПУНКТ(ИЗДЕЛИЕ) нет
It's a heading in a table column, and should read something like "Item No." Instead, it's saying "Point(Article) no," which may not seem that far off, until I tell you that what corresponds to "no" in the original Russian ("нет") is the word that is the opposite of "yes."
So there I am, staring at my screen and feeling like an idiot, because I can't figure out what that "нет" is doing there.. and then it hits me!
This document (a request for a quote) contains material that has been machine-translated from English to Russian! The original English "Item No." was translated mindlessly, and the "No." was not parsed as the abbreviation for "number," but as "no" (as in "the-opposite-of-yes").
Ye gods.
Once it was "translated," the document was modified to reflect a Russian response to the RFQ, returned to the U.S., and then sent (eventually) to me for translation.
This would account for the numerous parenthetical inserts in the text (one is shown above), as the machine translation software(program) tried(attempted) to do a workchiplike job of offering(providing) suitable(appropriate) alternatives(variants) while rendering its translation, albeit at the expense of readability, I'm afraid.
Yech!
Depending on your point of view, I am either really, really screwed (I haven't much experience rendering back-translations of stuff spit out by a machine), or really, really liberated (anything I write, pretty much, I can't be faulted for).
Oh, well...
Cheers...
