by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/10/16 23:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/10/16/833453.aspx
Fellow Technical Lead Stephen Toub posted about the coolest thing earlier today in his MSDN Magazine in 7 languages!
You can look at the November issue in any of the following language versions:
If you know one or more of these languages, I am anxious to hear what you think! :-)
I will see if I can post more about the story behind this effort, soon....
This post brought to you by ܞ (U+071e, a.k.a. SYRIAC LETTER YUDH HE)
Serge Wautier on 17 Oct 2006 2:38 AM:
I remember a few years ago I translated a couple of Joel on Software articles to French. The result, though it was edited by a guy who did a great job, looked horrible: It seemed to be written in a language I had never heard before. You know, when we speak about code and thing like that in French, the terminology we use remains in English. We speak of builds, managed code, bugs et al. Reading about générations, code géré and bogues just looked completely artificial and unnatural to me. Don't get me wrong: It's probably only me (and a few others). The computer books I read are exclusively in English but I'm always amazed at how this is not a general case: Most of my co-workers (especially the Frenches) read such books in French only (mostly for lack of understanding of English), where the technical vocabulary is translated (therefore ununderstandable as far as I'm concerned).
I just read the French version of the Security Practices article by Michael Howard. Exact same (bad) feeling! The good news is that my translation job for JoS articles might not have been that bad after all! But the bottom line is that such articles should not be translated. I'd rather pick a French magazine that deals about the same topics. What'd'ya say? There's none? Oh!
Again, it's probably only me.
Michael S. Kaplan on 17 Oct 2006 2:55 AM:
Ok, I guess the question now is whether the French translation meets the high quality of article that you would rather not read? :-)
Eric Duran on 17 Oct 2006 5:48 AM:
I agree with Serge. Probably is just us, but I can't stand anything technical translated to Spanish. Since I learned in English half of the computer stuff I know, I have a hard time translating the terms into Spanish. Besides, it really sounds odd and unnatural (not to mention, silly).
As for the MSDN Magazine, I have to say that some things remained in English, even in the Spanish version. Personally, I don't care, but there are some simple things like the name of the month (November) and some section's names (End Bracket) that could be possible to translate to Spanish (just to make the purists happy).
As for Microsoft, please, keep translating as much as possible, since most Spanish-speaking people, as Serge said, again, read stuff in their native language, mainly because that's the only language they know.
Eran on 17 Oct 2006 8:14 AM:
I speak English relatively well for a non-Anglo-Saxon, yet I'd usually prefer reading in Hebrew to reading in English. The translation of technical terms can be really annoying, but it's the reading flow that bothers me more. When reading technical stuff, you need to really concentrate, and having to deal with the language requires some attention I'd rather spend on the content. Therefore, I'd usually prefer reading an article in Hebrew.
Sadly, there are not enough Hebrew speakers for MS to add a Hebrew translation, but for the others I think this is really good news.
Mihai on 17 Oct 2006 4:55 PM:
The Chinese css is in fact English.
The fonts are Tahoma, Verdana, Arial. And too small :-)
Michael Dunn_ on 18 Oct 2006 6:42 PM:
I've recently discovered that I can sort-of read Portuguese. I speak French reasonably well, and Portuguese seems to be the closest (in orthography) to French out of the Romance languages that I've looked at. (I'm sure it helps that I worked with a guy from Rio in college, so I picked up some of the basics from him.)
There's a blog Inovações à Vista[1] that I see occasionally in the all-MS RSS feed and I can usually read it ok, albeit it takes a little longer than something in English/French.