OT: French translations

Gwern Branwen · 05 Aug 2009, 16:22 · from 2009-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 12:22:18 -0400 (EST)
Subject: (urth) OT: French translations
In-Reply-To: <323039.37086.qm at web50710.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <fy09ow4y5d9ofmyx39UYAxe124vaj_firegpg at mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Jerry Friedman<jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Wed, 8/5/09, gwern0 at gmail.com <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone. This is a rather
>> off-topic request, but bear with me. I'm desultorily
>> learning myself some French this summer, and I've decided
>> that since I'm only really interested in reading French (and
>> not so much in speaking or writing it), that the best thing
>> to do would be to simply translate some large French work
>> into English and learn as I go*.
>
> Si tu m'avais pos? la question, je t'aurais dit que c'est
> compl?tement fou. ?Mais tu te connais ? toi-m?me, et moi
> je ne te connais pas.

Ouch. It seemed like a good idea to me - if I want to read French, then the logical direction is French->English, not vice-versa....


> I don't know any, but have you tried searching for "Gene
> Wolfe" on French-language pages (using Google Advanced
> Search, for example)? ?Or searching http://www.amazon.fr/ ?

Amazon has a very impressive selection of Wolfe works - I was expecting to see Book of the New Sun at most, but I see Fifth Head of Cerberus, New Sun, Long Sun, Wizard-Knight, The Island of Doctor Death (strangely, it's just 'L'?le du docteur Mort et autres histoires'. Maybe the publisher didn't get the joke.), the Book of Days, Peace... But same objection as with Brunians.

> I suppose a French text on this subject is unlikely to be
> at a basic level, though.
>
> For non-Wolfe pages, see
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_French_Wikipedia
>
> If you decide to do that, you'll also want to read
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TRANSLATION
>
> Wikipedia is nice for this (and likewise for practicing
> writing in a foreign language, for those who want to do
> that) because you often get corrected.

...I feel very foolish now. Here I am, 5-6 years of Wikipedia editing, and my one thought was 'well, I don't want English->French, so anything Wikipedia (en->fr) is out' - never once thinking that there might be need of the other direction.

(Short articles aren't very good for testing my program, but that was the most minor of my desiderata, so no point carping about it.)


> I know people who have gotten good results from a different
> strategy for learning a foreign language--read a book in
> that language that they know well in their own. ?If you
> choose TBotNS, you can learn the French for quite common
> words such as "bordereau".
>
> Jerry Friedman

-- 
gwern
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090805/71cdded3/attachment.pgp>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net