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>I am keeping this in mind. But, I haven't heard anyone who speaks French say
>whether the word numeral is more or less translatable that the word number.
>Before this all came up, I had no clue that number wasn't perfectly easily
>translatable.
As somebody who does translations myself, all this sounds very wrong to me.
The way you do technical translations*, IMHO, is to read the original
text, gather its meaning, and write a text in the target language that
conveys the same meaning while being as similar as possible - "as
possible" being the operative phrase. The clarity and correctness of the
translated text are paramount, and if this means translating a word as
something else than what the dictionary says, then so be it.
Using this technique, the question does not arise whether words are
easily translatable or whether a word results in the correct translation,
because the concepts are translated, not the words.
I would strongly recommend that you follow the advice of an earlier
poster (sorry, too lazy to look up the name - it's past 11pm here): Write
the manual optimized for your language, i.e., English. Let the translator
worry about optimizing it for the target language.
As a translator, I would never dream of asking a writer to rephrase the
original text to make it "more translatable"; as a writer I would not
look kindly on such requests. (At least not unless they are accompanied
by a much better explanation than any that has been given here.)
Maybe I'm too harsh here, or maybe I didn't really understand the
problem, but to me this entire affair raises questions about how well
your translator is suited to the task.
Regards
Jan Henning
* Literary translations are obviously quite different in this regard.
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Jan Henning
ROSEMANN & LAURIDSEN GMBH
Am Schlossberg 14, D-82547 Eurasburg, Germany
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