[WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] [[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in English and another language?

Thu Sep 21 14:56:52 UTC 2006

On 21/09/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't really know what articles you all typically work on, but I've been
> concentrating on Mathematics articles, which I've noticed have fewer
> problems than a usual translation. Fortunately, the Pythagorean Theorem,
> which I'm working on right now, is available as an FA in two languages (de
> and fr), one of which I know well enough to make a translation, especially
> since a lot of the mathematics terms are spelling variations on the English
> (or vice versa, depending on how one chooses to look at it).

Yes. The more technical the field, the more likely the words are the same.

My most painful translation experience was [[Karin Spaink]], where I
tried to import data from the Dutch article (which is more detailed
because she's much more generally famous in NL) without knowing Dutch.
Note that she's someone I know from Usenet, and she actually added a
note to the article herself and we emailed about it. But whoooo, I
never want to try the translation trick on a living bio again.
*shudder*

- d.