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Not as long as the same person who, thinking in Dutch, wrote the English original, also does the translation back into Dutch.

The only reliable way of getting a truly lousy manual is to have it translated from the original designer's mother tongue, by people (or worse, machines) completely unburdened by any understanding of the subject matter. It translators people who don't actually understand the manual they were handed to translate in the first place, but still go ahead and "translate" it, to get a really lousy manual.

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Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
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Hans-Bernhard Broeker
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I think it's actually worse when they have a slight understanding of the subject matter.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
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Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com
Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

...

That'll teach 'em! Quality of documentation should be written into the procurement specs.

Jerry

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Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Reply to
Jerry Avins

There's logic in your position, but I don't think one needs to be uptight about it. Maybe I'm too sensitized by a past experience.

Once, in another technical newsgroup, a question posted in such poor English that it couldn't be reliably decoded was followed by one in Italian from the same poster. I forwarded that one to a friend for translation, but before I could post the friend's response, there was an angry post from some dude along the lines of "This is America! If you don't know the language, get out." I responded, "This is usenet, an international forum. If you can't abide foreigners, get out." He may have taken my exhortation to heart. We didn't hear from him again.

Rick Lyons (the DSP author) once remarked that he had been taught to look down on those who couldn't speak English without an accent. He did that until one day he realized that they all spoke at least one more language than he did. Sometimes, new respect comes in a flash.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Reply to
Jerry Avins

If someone feels more comfortable answering in a language that both he and the OP understand, is there any reason he should shut up and get the hell out of here? Maybe, just maybe, he should have restricted the cross- posting of this answer to only the Dutch groups, but it seems silly to not give an answer because someone else may not understand it immediately (but can understand with the small effort of using a dictionary).

- Met vriendelijke groet,

Maarten Bakker.

Reply to
maarten

A friendly greeting back to you!

Maarten,

I can usually interpret written Dutch fairly well by reading it aloud as if it were German, and listening to what I say as if it were mostly English with a little German or Yiddish. Weird, I suppose, but it usually works.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Reply to
Jerry Avins

It's easy to get worked up about this sort of thing on usenet - after all, just look at the heat a top-post or poor google post can generate!

There are two things that annoy me particularly on usenet - posters who assume readers are American or in America (only American's would give an address or telephone number without bothering to include the country), and posters who write in SMS code. Poorly written English is not a problem, and is perfectly understandable from non-native English speakers.

I do think that, in general, international newsgroups are best kept in English. Occasionally it can make sense for a post to be in a different language - depending on the posters' English skills, it may make a big difference to their understanding. But I think in that case it is polite for the poster to include a remark in English explaining the post, for the benefit of the majority of the newsgroup's readers.

med vennlig hilsen,

David

Reply to
David Brown

I see that point too. Fortunately, there are no hard and fast rules to abide by (other than "thou shalt not top-post" :-) Perhaps a brief remark in English, along with the post in Dutch, would have made it clearer to everyone.

My German is pretty poor, but I find knowing Norwegian lets me understand some written Dutch. I haven't tried reading it aloud, however.

mvh.,

David

Reply to
David Brown

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