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Subject:Re: Definately and English teachers... From:Karen Kay <karenk -at- NETCOM -dot- COM> Date:Sat, 10 Jun 1995 21:52:15 -0700
Matt Ion said:
> The majority of hardware and software manuals that I come across complicate
> this even further... so many of them appear to have been translated by
> computer from the original Japanese or something, with little or no subsequent
> editing.
Whoa! On behalf of Japanese translators and editors of Japanese
translation everywhere, let me suggest you put your blame on the
original bad writing! In fact, the sample you gave seems to me like it
was, in fact, edited after translation. The problem is, if there's no
information there, the translator is almost always not in a position
to go out and find it. I'm working on site for a single company at the
moment, and I *still* have this problem--maybe the people in Japan
know the answers to the kind of questions it would take to put real
information in the documents, but that information isn't available to
me anywhere in any of the three or four languages I can read. It
sounds to me like the original writing of the example you gave was
just bad. (I'm not saying all Japanese documentation is bad--some of
it is quite good. But the example below is a classic example of bad
writing.)
Karen
karenk -at- netcom -dot- com
-------------------------------------
> Here's a real gem from a motherboard manual I have laying about (all
> text exactly as it appears in print):
> "The PRECISION 386 III Mother Board is a 386-based IBM PC/AT<tm> compatible
> system board. It is specially use the OPTI HiD/386 AT CHIPSET, the HiD/386
> Chipset consists of the 82C381-B and 82C382-B. Together, they are designed to
> implement high performance, highly integrated PRECISIONS 386 AT personal
> computer running 25MHz."
