Kim, beware of your heroic offer! I read some books in both the original and translated formats and KNOW that they are different. Not only has the translator his 1st person understanding of WHAT to translate, the words convey the new language's ambiguity for the reader's OWN 1st person interpretation. (Lately about Self-organization in(orig) German and an excellent English version. German is my 2nd mother-tongue, English I live with - although only in the US - since 1965) Communication is Glücksache (matter of luck). (The orig. German proverb sais it for "foreign words" - Fremdwörter sind Glucksache). In scientific discours it is even worse. Bruno's difficulty stems from the urge to explain *his own* ideas to people with less knowledge than his own (not the regular 'teacher's problem' who conveys mostly only *general*knowledge) and 'you' (we all) do our best to follow. It is never enough. I think the trick of the 'Old Man' at the Tower of Babel was a dirty one: to mix up 'peoples' languages. This is why 'national' sciences are dfferent, even in physical sciences. Not the equations: the meaning/conclusions. The figments.
JohnM On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Kim Jones <kimjo...@ozemail.com.au> wrote: > > > On 31/01/2009, at 3:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > >> > >> I've also tried to dig through both Bruno's thesis with the help of > >> google translator. It works for a while but soon one hits a wall > >> with a > >> difficult sentence/paragraph which is hard to understand even if it > >> stands as the author inteded - and extra hard to understand if its > >> meaning is corrupted by the translation. > >> > >> Bruno, I'd love to read your thesis in english, but I fully > >> understand > >> how hard it must be to get a good translation that you would be happy > >> with. At the end, it might be easier to start from scratch, take the > >> essential from both thesis, update a little bit and write a book in > >> english on your own directly. Is that an option for you? > > > > Bruno reads beautifully in French. > > I have offered to translate some of his stuff - the Brussels thesis is > a wonderful read in French, I can't really understand the stuff about > the construction of the computer because I have no background in > computer science, but I can translate all the text into good, > idiomatic English if I could generate some little income in the > process. He has said "The road to hell is paved with the best of > intentions" to me in the past, and I agree with him on that, also that > publishing deals will benefit the publisher, not the author, but there > are many people (me included) who love his stuff now and wish it could > be presented to a wider audience. > > Failing that, a few of you might have to learn French, which would > benefit your brain cells anyway. French is just English pronounced > wrongly anyway ;-) > > K > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---