On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, Colin Belton wrote:
> Many manuals translated from Japanese are riddled with mistakes.
The biggest issue I've seen is that the translators generally are not
native English speakers. Even when they are familiar with with the
subject matter and terminology, they've studied it in Japanese, and so
don't know what words and phrases we use in English for concepts they
understand perfectly well.
I was quite amused at one point when I discovered that a translator
working for Canon's camera department did not know how to translate
"bokeh" (in the good sense) into English. (The meaning of "bokeh" is
the out-of-focus backround in an image with little depth of field; in
English photographers also use the word "bokeh" to talk about this.)
I've always found it odd that Japanese companies rarely seem even to
hire native-English-speaking proofreaders for their manuals. That could
clean them up quite a lot.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
*** Contribute to the Keitai Developers' Wiki! ***
*** http://www.keitai-dev.net/wiki/ ***
Received on Mon Jun 6 06:56:56 2005