[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Denis Koroskin]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:52:45 +0400, Don <nospam at nospam.com> wrote:

> 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...

That's funny.

I was once working at a company that enforced writing English comments to  
avoid issues like this (even though the whole company is Russian). Since  
then it's plain unnatural to me to write comments in anything other that  
English. Many large international companies do the same, or have specially  
hired technical writers to write English manuals.

For example, Sony Computer Entertainment has most of their code and  
samples commented in Japanese. Official English documentation may come  
weeks (or even months) after initial release of a product, and is often  
incomplete. In this case, using Google translator is often the only way to  
understand their code for non-Japanese speaking developers.