Hello Данило, On Sat, Apr 17, 2004 at 11:06:02PM +0200, Данило Шеган wrote: > > >> That puts the issue out in the open: if you don't go for > >> transcription, you lose out completely, because newcomers won't know a > >> thing you're talking about, and they even won't know how to read it or > >> call it (is that ???н-т-т-р??? or ???е??ч-ти-ти-ар???). I.e. they can't read > >> it, and they can't learn it. > >> > > Yes, it's a key point. Newcomers (or any other people) don't have to > > know anything than their native language and alphabet. Yeah, just as they can't learn anything about that wacky foreign program "Microsoft Word" that boasts its English title on them. Oh wait... nevermind. Face it, newbies don't know a thing about "HTML" and they don't care, until they need it and/or read about it somewhere. In Russia, this means they read the name in Latin. Dmitry says it's somehow wrong, but it's the fact that can't be helped in any other way than a totalitarian regime (and we don't want that again). For proof, try any Russian search engine. > I agree with your point. But I was aiming at *others* who disagree, > and I was aiming at them with extremely practical point that even if > they *did* know the Latin alphabet, there's no way for them to know how > to read HTTP if they don't already know about it and what it > represents. That, I think, is a problem better solved by introductory books rather than space-constrained UI items of a widely used computer application. > I'm talking about glyphs looking the same. HTTP looks exactly the > same as НТТР (eg. ???Нови Труд Тво??е Руси??е??? :). Not many programs > provide features such as M-x describe-char Emacs does, which might be > used to differentiate between the two. This justifies what? Does any, say, German l10n provide pronuncation hints for "HTTP" in order to prevent some naive Germans to refer to that as "ash-te-te-pe"? Does any random application have to include a mini translation assistant in its day-to-day UI? > Just ask a 10-year old kid to *read* this: ???C++??? or ???Язык C???. Ok, > everybody who is aware of ???C programming language??? (C as in ???see???) > won't have a problem here, but this will introduce a lot of problems > for everybody using a translation. Let's get back to the matter at hand. Please provide any realistic example where the said kid _needs_ the C++ highlighting mode in Gedit before he/she _knows_ about the language. > If you were writing introductory book for C, you would inevitably > have to write a couple paragraphs explaining that what everybody > thinks of as С (S, as in ???Слово???) is actually ???See??? or > ???Си???. It may come off as a surprise, but there is such practice in books (although it usually won't take two paragraphs). And the practice is good. For books. > Serbian even uses ???С??? itself to mean ???with??? (???С ??им??? ??? with him). > For instance, a sentence beginning like ???With it we can write our > own programs??? would be ???С ??им можемо писати сво??е програме???. I think it's a contrived example that is resolved by other means, such as rewording. > The simple proof of all this is ТеХ itself. How many times did you > see it called ???текс???? I saw it too many times. Erm... And for native English readers this "mistake" is less common how exactly? > So, if you want to cause misunderstandings, misinterpretations and > misnaming, you can go any of the paths (like Knuth has done with TeX, > using Greek alphabet with letters which look very much alike > Latin alphabet letters with different meaning and pronounciation). > But if you want to make your translation easily *unambiguous*, then > you won't mix Latin and Cyrillic scripts. I believe that depends on the definition of 'unambiguous'. Try to search for 'броузер' and 'браузер' in any Russian search engine (http://ya.ru) to see what I'm talking about. -- Stay tuned, MhZ JID: mhz altlinux org ___________ FORTUNE'S RULES TO LIVE BY: #2 Never goose a wolverine.
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