Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Sunday, January 25, 2009

  For Instance

This week's brain exercise:

Translate "Snapshot" to Spanish. A "Snapshot" takes a picture of the system as it currently stands.

The literal translation of that word to Spanish is "Foto", which rather strongly implies that you are taking a picture of... something...., rather than taking a picture of the system as it currently stands. It's more like bookmarking your work. Bookmark is a good word, but it is overloaded elsewhere in the program.

So the original translation of "Snapshot" was "Capturar instancuea de sesin", with a garbage character that made it unclear where the accent went. Snapshot is a nice, cool, word, man, it says a lot in only two syllables...

It gets weirder though, when you crack open the dictionary and wonder what instancea means. The word doesn't exist. "Instantáneo" does have "snapshot" as one of those meanings... so perhaps it's a direct translation. I don't know. It's short. Short is good.

You praise poedit for it's multi-lingual spell checker, and move onto the ...

wait .... what's this other word? instancia

Application form
Or Instancias de - At the request of

so even a mild idiom like, "For instance" can mistranslate to "para Application form"??

No wonder wars start.

and your eye falls across all the other "i" words on the page. instantar, intratable,

... inválido...

And then Angel tells you that you could have a feminine form for Instantáneo, Instastánea. Is a "static picture of what you are working on" male or female?

And you slam the book down ...

OK, it's feminine. I don't know why. She explains it via a tautology. OK, time to move on...

Desconectar.

Connectar. I have it so I can type these finicky little accent characters on my keyboard with the right-alt key, since it seems like nearly every word has them. Heck you hit this key more than space.... space should get split at least in half, maybe thirds (one for backspace)...

Desconectar

The word "mapping" doesn't exist in the mac dictionary. It does in the internet. Mapping. Deep word...

Desconectar

Bus... How the hell the 7th definition of this got mapped to "Bus" is beyond me. Computers. a circuit that connects the CPU with other devices in a computer.

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David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.


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