discuss: LDP Style discussion (cont.)
Subject:
Re: LDP Style discussion (cont.)
From:
Alexander Bartolich ####@####.####
Date:
9 Apr 2002 22:59:58 -0000
Message-Id: <3CB371C0.9060207@gmx.at>
Charles Curley wrote:
> [...]
> Worse, if your translator is not a native English speaker, your
> translator may not recognized that it was a joke. It's a good
> point. None the less, humor is one of the things that sets Linux doc
> above the rest of the world's, but I think we could adapt their point
> to say, "Be careful with humor for these reasons..." Maybe we should
> ask writers to put a <!-- joke! --> comment in their source. :-)
My native language is German.
I have been on the receiving end of (commercial) translations
quite a lot. And my summary is: They all suck.
They cost more, appear later and contain lots of word-for-word
transcriptions of technological terms. Usually written by
professional translators being completely computer illiterate.
Uncaught humor is really the last thing you should worry about.
And I really doubt that this is unique to software engineering,
though I have little experience with administrator's guides and
user's tutorials.
I don't see clarity of language a major problem with HOWTOs.
IMHO the really annoying part is the unscientific approach a
lot of authors have. It's OK to skip the background in a HOWTO
(though links might be nice). But it's very discouraging to read
through a load of pages just to discover at the bottom that
this all refers to kernel 2.1.97 or KDE 1.x or Tcl 7.6.
In my small niche of the world it breaks down to two things:
+ The language of programming is English. Get over it.
+ If it is no fun, I don't volunteer.
