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Brood War Korean Translations

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314 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.709s | source
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jaimebuelta ◴[] No.42743333[source]
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.

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1. eru ◴[] No.42746263[source]
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.)

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2. hollerith ◴[] No.42746289[source]
>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.

3. propter_hoc ◴[] No.42748689[source]
> 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?

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4. eru ◴[] No.42751885[source]
> 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