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Italian Ruby

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Re: Italian Ruby

#121
post #23

Also, sometimes, translations have a different (perceived) meaning. A pet peeve of mine is "by default". In Italian it is translated (correctly) "per difetto", and it is "fine" when other people already know the term, but otherways "difetto" is also the translation of "defect", and you will have a tough time explaining to a layman that it is not a "defect" in that other sense. Another "queer" word (I found it in the…

Even within English, a lot of the terms we use are kind of unnatural. I had an American professor once who complained about the use of the term "default" in computing. "Default" is what the bank does when it runs out of money. What does that have to do with me choosing something in the computer? Similarly, a "file" is a bundle of papers, not an individual document. A "program" lists things that will happen in a perfo…

Default makes sense to me... according to your own definition. It's the choice when you're out of choices. You fail to fulfill your obligation to specify behavior, so, default behavior.

Re: Italian Ruby

#122
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the dictionary of Repubblica (one of the main Italian Newspapers) authoritative enough? https://dizionari.repubblica.it/Inglese-Italiano/D/default.h... Nowadays it is not used much, but it has been for years in texts related to IT, a reference: http://vietatoridere.blogspot.com/2012/06/default-significat... BTW "per difetto" is also used in legal matters to mean "in mancanza"

No, that dictionary has lost all its authority with this, and no, I would not take texts related to IT as reference: those give the worst examples of bad translations. Take a look at this http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/difetto/ The only use of "per difetto" that existed before a translation of "by default" was ever needed is in the expression "approssimazione per difetto", and the new meaning forcefully attached…

>The only use of "per difetto" that existed before a translation of "by default" was ever needed is in the expression "approssimazione per difetto",

No, as said it is used in legal matters, example:

https://www.brocardi.it/massimario/59534.html

And you go tell this Italian professor:

http://www.diit.unict.it/users/alongheu/linguaggi/aa0910/lez...

The point is that it is actually correct in Italian, if you think about it also in "arrotondamento per difetto" (as opposed to arrotondamento per eccesso")[1] the meaning is that of "arrotondamento per mancanza", i.e. meaning #1 in the Treccani dictionary while it is much more commonly perceived as meaning #2.

[1] respectively "round down" and "round up"

Re: Italian Ruby

#123
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any attempts to have it both ways? Like, the source code stays in English but my IDE translates keywords to and from my language.

That's exactly how Excel does it. Personally, I don't like it. I prefer English function names. However, the most annoying thing about Excel localisation is that the behaviour of CSV import/export changes depending on the OS locale setting. It doesn't even let you override it. You actually have to change the OS settings to get the English behaviour.

Might be wrong on this one but I thought that I had heard that this was not the case in earlier versions and if you opened a German excel file on a computer set to English it would fail.

Re: Italian Ruby

#124
post #23

Also, sometimes, translations have a different (perceived) meaning. A pet peeve of mine is "by default". In Italian it is translated (correctly) "per difetto", and it is "fine" when other people already know the term, but otherways "difetto" is also the translation of "defect", and you will have a tough time explaining to a layman that it is not a "defect" in that other sense. Another "queer" word (I found it in the…

I will never read "ometti" in the same (sane) way again.

Re: Italian Ruby

#125
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Germans are dubbing and they usually speak English quite well. My experience with Italian as well as French don’t like to learn or speak English.

Germany is a bit more complex, because historically speaking, there has been cultural separation. In my experience: - middle aged people speak an ok english - elderly speak a poor or no english - young people speak a very good one Something also worth considering is, as I've previously mentioned, the exposure to international traffic. In big German cities, there are a lot of foreigners; much less in Italy. Finally, i…

Also don't forget the east/west split. And while it's been 30 years (oh wow) some Germans who are now as young as 45 had Russian in school and not English.

Re: Italian Ruby

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the problem is that translations are wrong, but appear correct if seen by English speaking person through reverse translations, because literal English-Italian translation mapping for said expressions happen to be robust and consistent within itself, despite being inconsistent with actual Italian language in actual real world context.

If the term doesn't exist in Italian and you're translating it for the first time, it can't be wrong (by definition). I had never seen the Greek translation of "by default" in Greek, but now it's just one more computer term.

No I disagree, it can be wrong: You cannot translate "by default" with "quando si mangiano le mele" (trans.: "when eating apples"). That is wrong.

And you can do even worse: translate "by default" with "in caso di successo" (trans.: "in case of success")

Or also very bad: translate "by default" with "alla scrittura su disco" (trans.: "when writing on disk")

At least the new term must not mean anything else than what it should.

Re: Italian Ruby

#127
post #88

Only ~5% of Earth speaks English natively. Another 15% speak it as an nth language. I think English based programming is an anomaly that came out of the post-WWII US/UK cultural world order, and from that sustained economic boom came modern computers, languages and the internet to a mass market. 20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively…

Written English is by far the best language among the globally popular ones and the European languages because it's easier to learn due to its small alphabet with no special ligature rules, small frequently used vocabulary, and low number of word variants. Spoken English is not so good due to complex and unintuitive pronunciation, but that's not very relevant nowadays where most media is text (and also, it would be e…

Characters are not a problem at all. They can be learned in a week or two. For me, Spanish is much easier to learn - I can read it without a problem, even if I don't know Spanish at all. I can take text of an unknown song in Spanish and then start to sing it immediately. In contrast, I struggle to pronounce English words even today, after 32 years of learning English as programmer. English poetry can damage my brain.

Re: Italian Ruby

#128
post #73
post #23

Also, sometimes, translations have a different (perceived) meaning. A pet peeve of mine is "by default". In Italian it is translated (correctly) "per difetto", and it is "fine" when other people already know the term, but otherways "difetto" is also the translation of "defect", and you will have a tough time explaining to a layman that it is not a "defect" in that other sense. Another "queer" word (I found it in the…

> "by default" ... In Italian it is translated (correctly) "per difetto" No way: the correct translation of "by default" is "valore predefinito", anyone who translates it "per difetto" has serious issues with Italian language.

Correct, "per difetto" means flooring a number.

Re: Italian Ruby

#129

There's this absolutely mind bending idea that is - every single function should have a unique identifier. Which is to say: def square(x: Int): Int = x * x should get hashed (and if it has dependencies, they should get hashed in there, too), and your programming language should track the unique identity of this function, and keep a list of names separately from the hashes. This totally solves the localization problem…

So these functions get the same name then:

  def following_index(i: Int) = i + 1

  def item_count_with_free_gift(n: Int) = i + 1

Re: Italian Ruby

#130
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even within English, a lot of the terms we use are kind of unnatural. I had an American professor once who complained about the use of the term "default" in computing. "Default" is what the bank does when it runs out of money. What does that have to do with me choosing something in the computer? Similarly, a "file" is a bundle of papers, not an individual document. A "program" lists things that will happen in a perfo…

Default makes sense to me... according to your own definition. It's the choice when you're out of choices. You fail to fulfill your obligation to specify behavior, so, default behavior.

"Default" means someone being unable to do the thing they're supposed to do. If your opponents don't turn up to a darts match, they have defaulted, and so you win "by default".

You can just about support the computer sense by thinking that a default choice is used when a user has failed in their duty to make an explicit choice, etc. But it is a bit of a stretch.

Of course, by now, the computer sense has fed back into broader usage, so it just seems like a perfectly ordinary use of the word.

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