[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Walter Bright]

Stanislav Blinov wrote:
> Here I agree that paper books beat any ebooks.
> As for Russian translations - I don't like them since I've taken a look 
> at translated GoF book on design patterns. Translations are unbearable 
> far too often. Most of the time, people who translate such books are 
> either totally incompetent in CompSci, or know little to know aspects of 
> the particular area covered by the book. That leads to mistakes, 
> inconsistensies, errors. And often, the translation itself is hardly 
> readable compared to original. So I'd personally rather buy the book 
> from original publisher (therefore giving my monetary thanks to the 
> author) rather than pay additional sum for questionable work of 
> translators and local publishers.

In the last couple of my trips to conferences in Europe, I talked to developers 
who were not native english speakers about this. They were unequivocal and 
emphatic in wanting to do their programming in english. The thing is, the 
programming community is global, covering about every country and language, and 
english is what binds them all together. They're cut off if they are not 
conversant in technical english, and as you said, are unhappy with second-rate 
buggy translations.

This wasn't true 25 years ago, when localizing the programming tools was all the 
rage.

I use google translator a lot. Sure, it often gives very bad translations, but 
they are good enough that you can get what the author is saying.