Brood War Korean Translations

LOL, as a non-native English speaker, reading this reminds me of EXACTLY the same problem of translating many things, but more precisely, computer articles and software development.

There’s a huge amount of terms that are difficult to translate (sharding? Hash?). The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time. But it requires a community that, to some degree, is able to cross the gap between the languages. In this case, learning English.

Talking about software development in Spanish (my native language) is a succession of imported terms from English.

I don’t think there’s a good way of doing that, and I’m interested to see how automatic translations deal with it, because the only way this can work is with a process of mixing both language in a social way and see what terms evolve from that process.

And you need, in the terms the post describes, people that know Korean at least in a non-fluent way. And the game itself, of course.

With Spanish we have the added complexity that there are different linguistic traditions around the world. For example, in Mexico I learned "depurar", an existing Spanish word that closely fits the meaning of "debug". However, many Spanish speakers simply say "debuguear", just directly borrowing the English word. In Mexico I also learned "desempeño" to describe the performance of a computer or software, but in Argentina I've heard "el performance" to say the same.

I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.

Why would sharding and hash be difficult to translate when they use metaphors that are easy to visualize in a "physical" context ?

I think the words' metaphorical meanings don't help much unless you already know what they mean. If you heard the word "sharding" for the first time and all you knew was that it had something to do with computers, I think you'd have a hard time guessing that it means "partitioning rows of a database across multiple servers to reduce load".

Sure there’s a Spanish word for shard though?

According to Google, shard directly translates to el casco - helmet, shell, hoof, hulk, body, shard

But in English in this context I read it more like shard of glass, which Google translates as fragmento de vidrio

In some sense, these terms are extremely trivial to adapt: the German term for sharding is just a literal borrow, just say 'sharding'.

What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words. German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.

> The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time.

You can see some good examples of that when you look at railway related terms in German. They used to be all English, because that's where we got the technology from. But over time they have been replaced with mostly German native-looking terms. (Well, native looking, but many of them like Lokomotive re-created from the same borrowing from Greek or Latin as in English. But eg station is now Bahnhof. And train is Zug.)

>What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words.

That is very silly: just because German bread is different from British bread doesn't make the word "Brot" almost impossible to translate.

Yes, but this goes for the English word too.

> German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.

I'm absolutely puzzled by this. Not British but I've been to both countries and can't say I noticed much difference in their bread.

What do you consider to be the key distinction between German and British bread? Why do you think it is such a dramatic change that you can't countenance using the same word?

In Polish literature, I saw "reflection" translated literally in programming book and it took me a while to even understand what the translator was trying to do.

Keeping loanwords is just simpler - we're going to learn them from English anyway.

> Not British but I've been to both countries and can't say I noticed much difference in their bread.

I've lived in both places multiple times for years and decades. But even a cursory visit should show you vast differences. The Brits don't even believe in rye.

You can do a simple visual comparison from the comfort of your own home:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+deutsches+brot

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+english+bread