[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Don]

Walter Bright 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.

I would say, though, that the most important thing is to use a language 
which you are reasonably fluent in.

I occasionally have to maintain a body of code which was written by an 
Italian programmer. Some of the comments are in Italian, amd the 
variable names are all in Italian, but most of the comments are in his 
attempt at German, but they have Italian word order. Some maintenance 
has been done by a fellow Australian who was just learning German, he 
added comments in some English-German hybrid.
It's hilariously incomprehensible. And unfortunately google translator 
only works with real languages...