Re: Confusion of Applet and Capplet :)

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On 21 Jun 2001 18:38:21 +0200, Christian Rose wrote:

>> Okay...some of those names were a little silly....but I don't see much
>> of a reason if they don't translate...I mean, there are plenty of
>> made up terms everywhere and they aren't translated [shit, if only I
>> could think of an example].

> You give a perfect reason why terminology should be picked so that it
> translates well - because there is already too much invented nonsense
> techno-babble that doesn't. There's no need to deliberately make that
> situation worse.

> There are plenty of other reasons why terminology should be picked so
> that it translates easily. Invented nonsense words like "Gizmo",
> "Yokeys", "Thingameybobs", "Whizlets" and "Evilets" are particulary bad
> examples. The reason is that they simply are nonsense words that give no
> information about what they are in themselves. They are thus hard to
> understand as terminology even by English users, and the situation just
> gets worse when exporting the terminology to another language.

Of course, most of these words aren't "invented nonsense words".
"Gizmo", "Thingamabob" and so on are in the dictionary. "Gizmo" dates to
1943, and "Thingamabob" dates to 1832. So they're not neologisms, or
something that was just invented for our purpose.

I can think of several ways to translate both these words into Norwegian
(my own native language), and for what it's worth, I can think of a
couple of candidates in Swedish and Danish too.

Of course, there might not be any *exact* translations, but there rarely
are.

So, don't assume that words don't mean anything just because you don't
know them. :)


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   Joakim Ziegler - Ximian Web Monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
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