[Sca-cooks] Translations

[Audrey Bergeron-Morin]

> It's going to be a long day and a night
> before they come up with an English-to-French computerized translation
> system that will make the latter happy.  As bilingual comedian Eddie
> Izzard says, "I like the French, but they can be so French!"

It's got nothing to do with French. It's true of any language. French
is much closer to English than we tend to think (partly because a lot
of French word were integrated into the English language after 1066,
and partly, I think, because they evolved close to each other for
millenia) than, say, Chinese... I'm a translator by trade. None of us
working in the field are worried about computers taking our jobs, for
this very reason. Language is simply too... human... or irrational...
to be successully translated by machines, unless you confine
yourselves to very narrow fields (for example, there are successful
automatic translation tools for weather reports).

Of course, it's much worse when you're trying to translate things that
date back a couple of centuries, when, more often than not, the
grammar/vocabulary wasn't fixed yet and varied from writer to writer
and region to region. And modern tools can't be applied to them
because of those same variations.

Even when it's a human doing the work, it's sometimes not much better
because that person can be versed, for example, in the language of the
time but know nothing about cooking, so it comes out all wrong. We've
all read some of those translations that we don't want to use because
we know they're full of inaccuracies.

As for the present debate, I think if someone is posting a recipe in
another language, if they talk about the general meaning, it's great!
I don't expect a full translation, but if they're posting on the list
asking a question about something, they'll get more useful answers if
they make sure everybody can understand. If they post it just because
they want to share, then people will do as they do with any other
thing that comes on the list: decide if it's pertinent for them, then
keep it or delete it!