On Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:52:45 +0400, Don <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
Stanislav Blinov wrote:
Here I agree that paper books beat any ebooks.
As for Russian translations - I don't like them since I've taken a
look at translated GoF book on design patterns. Translations are
unbearable far too often. Most of the time, people who translate such
books are either totally incompetent in CompSci, or know little to
know aspects of the particular area covered by the book. That leads to
mistakes, inconsistensies, errors. And often, the translation itself
is hardly readable compared to original. So I'd personally rather buy
the book from original publisher (therefore giving my monetary thanks
to the author) rather than pay additional sum for questionable work of
translators and local publishers.
In the last couple of my trips to conferences in Europe, I talked to
developers who were not native english speakers about this. They were
unequivocal and emphatic in wanting to do their programming in english.
The thing is, the programming community is global, covering about every
country and language, and english is what binds them all together.
They're cut off if they are not conversant in technical english, and as
you said, are unhappy with second-rate buggy translations.
This wasn't true 25 years ago, when localizing the programming tools
was all the rage.
I use google translator a lot. Sure, it often gives very bad
translations, but they are good enough that you can get what the author
is saying.
I would say, though, that the most important thing is to use a language
which you are reasonably fluent in.
I occasionally have to maintain a body of code which was written by an
Italian programmer. Some of the comments are in Italian, amd the
variable names are all in Italian, but most of the comments are in his
attempt at German, but they have Italian word order. Some maintenance
has been done by a fellow Australian who was just learning German, he
added comments in some English-German hybrid.
It's hilariously incomprehensible. And unfortunately google translator
only works with real languages...
That's funny.
I was once working at a company that enforced writing English comments to
avoid issues like this (even though the whole company is Russian). Since
then it's plain unnatural to me to write comments in anything other that
English. Many large international companies do the same, or have specially
hired technical writers to write English manuals.
For example, Sony Computer Entertainment has most of their code and
samples commented in Japanese. Official English documentation may come
weeks (or even months) after initial release of a product, and is often
incomplete. In this case, using Google translator is often the only way to
understand their code for non-Japanese speaking developers.
