D french-speaking community

Raphaël Jakse raphael.jakse at gmail.com
Sat Nov 9 02:16:15 PST 2013


Le 09/11/2013 10:56, monarch_dodra a écrit :
> On Saturday, 9 November 2013 at 08:32:24 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Friday, November 08, 2013 23:51:16 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> On 11/8/13 11:43 PM, Raphaël Jakse wrote:
>>> > I had a really hard time translating "slice". I opted for > "tranche".
>>>
>>> morceau?
>>
>> I suppose that that would work, but I believe that tranche would be
>> the more
>> direct translation (certainly, it's what's used when talking about
>> slices of
>> bread). However, I don't know if there's another word that happens to
>> have
>> more accurate connotations in this case.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> French myself too, but I consider myself part of the English community.
>
> My personal feeling is that when it comes to translating technical
> jargon, it is sometimes best to just keep the original word,
> explain/learn what it means, and stick with that.
>
> This is because the "words" are already loaded with more meaning than
> what basic English gives them, for example, "range"/"interval". Or
> "aggregate" or what not. All words with very specific meanings in the
> context of a specific *programming* language, that transcends the
> English language itself.
>
> If you "translate" those words, you are actually creating new words,
> which will require people to associate a new meaning to said word, when
> the original English word was perfectly fine for it.
>
> The japanese seemed good at doing these kind of things when I was there,
> talking about things like "regista", or whatnot.
>
> On the contrary, the French seem to like *everything* to get translated,
> to the point where the French themselves get confused by the double
> standard. For example, for "stack"/"heap", the French have "tas"/"pile".
> I'm French myself, and I can never remember which is which! Why couldn't
> they just keep "stack"/"heap"?

Same problem in English, you need to remember the meaning of each word.

More different words are heap and queue, which translate into "pile" and 
"file" in French, no problem for me in both languages. And I like the 
use of French word here. French computer science lessons with too much 
English words would be difficult to follow in my opinion. "pile" and 
"file" are easy to understand, because we can imagine "a heap of plates" 
("une pile d'assiettes") or "une file d'attente" (... a "queue"), where 
the first in is the first out.

Problem is, most technical term appear in English because technical 
people speak in English to be understood across the world.
I think each language should get an appropriate translation of these 
words, and a suitable translation for this new word could be the word 
itself, with a writing and a pronunciation more "natural" than the 
direct English word, if the English word didn't existed in the first 
place or has no translation in other languages. Context is then 
retrieved when the word is used in a specific domain.

Often, everyday life English words like "slice" were used to refer to a 
technical concept, and then the usage became familiar in the domain (the 
"context" is now there). I think all languages can do the same, that's 
why I think translation instead of just importing the English word is 
right in this situation.


>
> That's what I feel like anyways. Explaining things in your local
> language is fine, but if technical words get translated, oftentimes, you
> lose more from the loss of the context specific definition, then the
> gain from replacing it with a word in your own language, but with no
> added definition.



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list