RE: French Terms

["Kahn, David [JNJFR]" <DKahn1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd be extremely wary of using translations from Babelfish. For example,
"exit point" and "exit program" have been interpreted in the imperative. So
"quittez le point" and "quittez le programme" mean "leave the point" and
"leave the program" respectively.

These types of translations are quite difficult even if your French is good
and you have a French colleague with good English sitting with you. You
really need to look at native examples in the context you're using. As
another example of the problems involved, IBM translates "remote command" as
"commande à distance" but "remote definitions" as "définitions éloignées".

And if you really want to expose the shortcomings of Babelfish try pasting
in some text (this posting would do nicely), let Babelfish translate it into
French, then get it to render it's own translation back into English.
Babelfish is great for a quick and free but very rough rendering into your
native language, but hopeless for anything more ambitious.

Dave Kahn
Johnson & Johnson International (Ethicon) France
Phone : +33 1 55 00 3180
Email :  dkahn1@jnjfr.jnj.com (work)
           dkahn@cix.co.uk      (home)


-----Message d'origine-----
De: Jim Langston [mailto:jlangston@conexfreight.com]
Date: 20 September 1999 16:53
À: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Objet: Re: French Terms


Alta vista has a language conversion utility.  Let me see if I can find
it...

Here is the url: http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/translate?
I just went to http://www.altavista.com and looked for the hyper link,
which was right there.

These should be literal translations.  They "look" okay, although I don't
know french myself.

<snip>
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