On 19 August 2003 00:35, Hafid wrote:
> Hi
>
> > These are extremely simple examples of English, and should not be
> > in the least difficult to understand. I have to say that, in my
> > opinion, if you cannot easily follow the meaning of these, your
> > understanding of English must be extremely basic, and certainly not
> > up to the job of translating a technical document such as the PHP
> > manual.
>
> I find your comments partly true when you say that the examples I gave
> [should not be in the least difficult to understand] mainly
> that you SEEM to
> be talking as a programmer and thinking that all people are
> programmers or should be to.
No, I'm talking as a former programmer who has also spent 10+ years as a technical
editor writing and editing documents aimed at all levels of user from beginner
upwards. My comments were made because I could not see any possible way of
misinterpreting those sentences if you apply the basic rules of English grammar and
then examine the results phrase by phrase. If you think there is ambiguity in those
sentences, then your level of understanding of English is simply not up to the job.
>
> example 1 >> Must be writable by whatever user PHP is running as.
>
> Generally speaking, the sentence seems to be clear mainly the
> first part
> [Must be writable by whatever user] but the problem is that
> for a newcomer
> PHP is a language / software. And when seeing this sentence,
> I ask myself if
> I'm talking about:
> - PHP running as a USER or
> - PHP running in a certain WRITABLE MODE.
I simply don't see how you can extract the second meaning from the sentence as
presented. Your grouping seems to be simply wrong. Perhaps part of your problem is
that this is not a full sentence, but a verb-object fragment with an implied subject
(presumably something referring to a file or directory), which deconstructs as follows:
? -- implied subject
Must be writable -- verb phrase
by -- preposition
the user PHP is running as -- noun phrase (object)
I cannot see any other reasonable parsing of this phrase.
> example 2 >> The following table describes some of the extensions
> available and required additional dlls.
>
> I don't know which meaning do I have to take:
> - some of the [AVAILABLE extensions] and [required additional
> DLLs] or
> - some of the [extensions' ] [available and required additional DLLs]
Again, your second proposal makes no kind of sense -- especially with that added
possessive apostrophe, which in itself should be a major clue. In fact, both your
proposed interpretations are *less* clear than the original -- I've now read both of
them several times, and I don't think *either* of them captures the meaning of the
original sentence.
Your first interpretation, whilst theoretically possible, doesn't really make sense
-- why would we be talking about *required* DLLs isolated from but in the same
sentence as *optional* DLLs? To have proposed this meaning demonstrates a
misunderstanding of the semantics of this sentence -- the addition of the conjunction
"and required additional DLLs" directly to "extensions required" makes these
implicitly connected, so that the understanding is that the DLLs are "required" by the
"extensions available" -- so I would render this more as "... some of the (available
extensions and [their] required additional DLLs" (note the explicit insertion of an
implied possessive). (Incidentally, I would say that there's a subtle difference
between "extensions available" and "available extensions", but I'm not sure it's
relevant to this discussion (or that I could even accurately express the difference in
just a few words!).)
Your second proposed interpretation, on the other hand, is clearly nonsense --
"available" could not possibly be the object of a possessive as it's not a noun but a
verb participle; and if you leave the apostrophe out, "extensions ... required
additional DLLS" is also a nonsense. If I've correctly interpreted what you're
driving at with this one, it would have to be written thus to have sensible meaning:
"... some of the extensions available and extensions' required additional DLLs" --
which, now I look at it, is, in fact, pretty close to the meaning I derived above.
Again, by inserting an implied possessive, this would come out to "... some of the
extensions available, and [those] extensions' required additional DLLs" -- which is
pretty much the same as above, but expressed in a slightly wordier fashion.
> I also accept your remarks and I'm really interested in your
> work because it
> is simply GREAT and HUGE and I hope you continue your
> creativity. But don't
> forget noone creates just for himself and that if we oblige
> someone to be
> specialist in a field to translate in it, we won't translate anything.
Well, the only field I think I'm requiring you to be a specialist in for these
examples is the English language. I accept that some of the individual words might be
quite obscure -- especially the regular everyday ones used with a completely different
specialist meaning -- but a good technical dictionary should help there, or even an
online "geek-speak" resource such as http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/contents.html
or http://www.whatis.com/.
Cheers!
Mike
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