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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4665 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 1025 of 1317 26 May 2014 at 11:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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emk l'a déjà vu mais pour ceux qui s'intéressent à la question de McDo en France : McDo : Une passion française Edited by tastyonions on 26 May 2014 at 11:33am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| napoleon Tetraglot Senior Member India Joined 5016 days ago 543 posts - 874 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, Hindi, Urdu Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 1026 of 1317 26 May 2014 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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N'oublions pas les commentaires sur ces deux livres en Amazon. Ce sont vraiment interessants. Edited by napoleon on 26 May 2014 at 6:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1027 of 1317 26 May 2014 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yeah, I have no idea what the deal is with the French and McDonald's. If you're going to import American burger chains, try Five Guys or In-N-Out. When my wife arrived in the US, she was really surprised by how empty the McDonald's were here.
A translation exercise. I have so much respect for translators. Even when I translate from French to English, it's a huge struggle to produce something which is faithful to both the meaning and the style of the original text. As mahasiswa wrote, I get "lost in the translator's interlanguage," and the original French text subtly distorts my English. So if I want clean English text, I need to translate something, put it aside for a while, and then go back and revise it later to make it flow. So you can image how rough it will be for me to go from English to French. Recently, I decided to attempt a bit of technical blogging in French. As part of this effort, I'm translating one of my older articles from English to French, and some of the little details are surprisingly challenging. Here's part of one of the posts I want to translate:
And here's the first draft of my translation:
You can see some of the issues I'm wrestling with: 1. I can't find a French equivalent "chunks of." "Tas de" isn't bad, but it feels wrong in this context. So I went with the slightly more neutral "morceau de". I'm obviously going to run this by a couple of native speakers before publishing it. 2. Again, "referring to things by name" seems work better if I avoid the obvious cognate and go with something like "identifier". 3. The Gettysburg address isn't going to be immediately familiar to most French readers, and my wife couldn't think of any instantly-recognizable French speeches of the same nature. (I'm sure there are well-known speeches, but if a native can't suggest one in 10 seconds, it defeats the purpose.) Fortunately, I spend enough time immersed in French pop culture that I can find a replacement. 4. The function names in the code remain in English. This is a very tricky point, because there are three possible conventions: purely French code, "Franglais" code, and English code. Purely French code is impossible, because French programmers use enormous numbers of libraries with English-language interfaces. Purely English code is also problematic, because lots of business and governmental terminology won't translate into English. (If you're working on a French HR database, you want to call "une carte de sejour" a "CarteDeSejour", and translating it into English is obviously a stupid idea.) So in France, I'm told that the typical solution is to code in Franglais. In Québec, this is apparently considered nasty and gross, and many programmers supposedly prefer to work entirely in English. Of course, this also means that I need to learn things like which verb forms to use in code comments. UPDATE: Here's a nice example of how this often works in practice. 5. This article involves lots of highly technical terminology, things like "interned symbol" and "keyword arguments." In some cases, it takes me five minutes of web searching to figure out how French writers have translated a key term. My first step: look up the technical terminology on Wikipedia, and follow the link to the corresponding French article. When this works, it's great. If all else fails, I try to invent a literal translation and I start Googling. This usually results in a blatant anglicism, but then again, native French programmers use all kinds of blatant anglicisms. Anyway, please feel free to tear apart my translation and suggest better ways to do it. :-) I find that lang-8 is pretty much useless for things like informal technical translations at B2+, unless I have the right kinds of friends on the site. The easiest sort of texts to correct are somewhere around B1: the meaning tends to be clearer than with A1 texts, and the errors are easier to explain than those found in C1 texts. Edited by emk on 27 May 2014 at 12:27am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jhaberstro Senior Member United States Joined 4393 days ago 112 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 1028 of 1317 27 May 2014 at 4:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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First, I'd be really interested to read your translated log as both (a) a programmer and (b) a French learner. Second,
if you're finding lang-8 is failing you for these type of translations, you might try posting technical vocabulary questions at the French stackexchange. I've noticed that quite a few of the members answering questions are programmers by trade (and no doubt, originally stackoverflow members). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1029 of 1317 08 June 2014 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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jhaberstro, I sent you a link.
Lots of things to read in French As previously mentioned, sctroyenne and I have made Twitter lists with lots of fun French content to amuse you. Do you want a steady stream of hundreds of cool things to read in French, far fresher and more amusing than IMX? Check it out, and customize it. Lately, however, I've been spending more time with Feedly, an RSS reader. RSS subscriptions are sort of like Twitter subscriptions, except (1) you don't have to go through a centralized company, and (2) you get way more than 140 characters. Feedly turns out to be a pretty nice RSS reader, though there are dozens on the market. Anyway, here's me, browsing some recent French humor on the web: 
If you want to check out my subscription list, see this OPML file. Most RSS readers can import OPML subscription lists without any problem, though you might need to Google around to find instructions. For any programmers who are reading along, I particularly recommend CommitStrip, which covers all sorts of geeky subjects: 
Lire la suite Anyway, if you spend an afternoon playing around with Feedly or another RSS reader, you'll have a steady stream of cool, personalized things to read in French, for free. Egyptian I just made Anki cards for for lesson 55 of Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique. We're right in the middle of an amusing story from the Westcar papyrus, which is full of delightfully strange grammatical forms. But my favorite discovery was in the exercises at the end of one of the lessons:     
rA | n(y) | pr(i).t | m | hrw word | of | to go (out) | in | day Book of Going Forth by Day ...also known in English as "The Book of the Dead." It's pretty amazing to be able to read a title like this. In transliteration, I can more-or-less read it at a glance. In hieroglyphs, I need to decipher a bit but I can still read it. I'm really happy my wife recommended Assimil to me all those years ago. It's a perfect fit for my learning style. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4533 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 1030 of 1317 08 June 2014 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't used Assimil, but from all the positive things I have heard about it I would probably recommended it to people wanting to learn German. Can you summarize in a few sentences who it would best suit? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 1031 of 1317 08 June 2014 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the piece of your translating. It is certainly a tricky thing to choose the proper language when it comes to programming. I've been occasionaly translating medicine related articles and such things and I have found a bit of a similar trouble. Who is the public? Should I therefore keep mostly to the Latin based words, to the Czech ones, or try to balance it out? If I choose too many Latin words, some readers (non professionals) might be intimidated and have trouble understanding. If I choose too many Czech ones, the result won't look clever enough. Not to mention many medicine students have trouble remembering the purely Czech words (It is funny when a pedagogy student wants to review anatomy with a medicine student. Not only the amount of details is different. They are each learning it in another language :-D )And the same goes for many science and popular science texts where the authors need to juggle the Czech, Latin(ised), English and some other words too. It is interesting to see the same struggle in another field as well :-D I usually use google search to great success for contexts and so on. It usually gives me wikipedia (it's awesome to just switch languages and get more or less the same vocab in the target language, I agree :-) ), directly some articles, thesauri, and so on. Our strategies probably don't differ much.
Just one idea: You might find it useful to consult some kind of "programming textbook" for French beginning programmers. It should contain the common vocabulary easily in one place. Your note as well supports my opinion that the internet had 1000 times larger impact on English becoming so dominant than all the political and historical events of the 20th century. English is the native language of computers not only thanks to the lack of diacritics. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1032 of 1317 08 June 2014 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
Persistent extensive learners, basically. Assimil's passive wave is a basically a graded listening/reading text with grammar footnotes and cloze exercises, split up into chunks that typically take 20–60 minutes. It supplies L2 text, L2 audio and L1 audio. To benefit from it, people seem to need two things: (1) enough self discipline to do roughly one lesson per day for 5 or 6 months, and (2) a willingness to figure things out from context, the way you do when you're reading or listening to real German. This suits me well, because I dislike studying grammar until I've seen lots of real-world examples, and because I'm actually pretty persistent (as the Super Challenge and my Egyptian project show). For people who like to see the "big picture", it's possible to combine Assimil with a short grammar overview. I usually recommend Essential French Grammar to students of French. It's short and to the point, and it works well for people who mostly prefer extensive methods. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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