[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Andrej Mitrovic]

This isn't just true for programming. Some major universities (e.g. in
Croatia) usually require the student to read textbooks written in
English. A lot of books have never been translated to a local
language, and those that have often have lousy 1:1 translation, with
not much thought given to the semantics of a sentence. Translating
technical terms is especially difficult. In fact most of our technical
terms around here are almost identical to English ones, with an added
letter or two. So when you read a translated book it feels like you're
reading in two different languages.

The good thing is that learning English is mandatory in Junior school,
at least where I come from.

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Walter Bright
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 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.
>