Handbook translations

Thanks... I'll remember for the future.

Yes, well, I studied a Dutch short story as part of the Literature syllabus of the subject "Afrikaans Home Language" at school. It is kind of like reading Shakespeare when studying English. So it certainly would be possible.

However, I would not advise doing so if it could be helped, for the following reasons:

1. No translation is perfect. Information or intent or nuance of the original always gets lost during the translation process. This is the reason why the Bible is translated from Hebrew and Greek and not from the Vulgate (Latin translation) or other translations. For that reason, I would only work from a translation if I don't understand the original language. In this case, I actually understand the original language (English) better than Dutch.

2. Non-technical Dutch is close to Afrikaans, but technical Dutch can differ quite a bit from Afrikaans. Especially when it comes to computer terms (which developed independently in both languages after the split), I am often hard pressed to figure out what exactly does a word mean. One example is "Sla op" in the Dutch translation of the software. If I didn't know that that specific menu item was called "Save" in English, I wouldn't have understood at all. In Afrikaans, "Slaan op" would refer to what you do to your tent when you want to fold it open and anchor it, etc.

So, I do use the Dutch (and German and, to a lesser extent, the Scandinavian languages') translations as a kind of concordance, but not as my source. As I said, in my case, my English is actually better than my Dutch, so no point in using Dutch anyway.

For paragraph translations, that may actually be possible, although you'd end up with a text that would look like Afrikaans, but not sound like Afrikaans. Dutch phrasing is simply different from Afrikaans. It would be faster (and lead to better translations to just use Google Translate from English to Afrikaans.

Off-topic: Are all the nodes that are to be translated listed on that first page of the user manual (i.e. at node 35711)? I was wondering if it is possible to download the entire user manual in this wiki format.

@Jojo-Schmitz
TM = translation memory - this is a translation database allowing the reuse of previously-translated sentences and text fragments through string matching.
TM works very well with text which varies only a little from the "previous translation", but less well with brand new topics. TM is often used for instruction manuals, maintenance handbooks etc.

MT = machine translation - this is a different technique, usually based on syntactic analysis of each sentence. MT should be able to handle almost any text, even with a topic never encountered before. But MT can sometimes produce translations which are quite bizarre, and certainly not as fluent and natural as the fixed phrases used in TM.