On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Aaron Goldfein wrote: > On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Ed Murphy <[email protected]> wrote: >> It was reasonably clear that you intended to initiate a case, but the >> details were considerably less clear; presumably an inquiry case on >> "I am a person", but the Yoda-esque alteration of word order and >> especially "conviction" muddy the waters. > > I speak Spanish. I'll draft something in Spanish and use a translator to put > it into English later today. >
In ais523's example, the general, more wordy arguments that passed through the translator and had additional informational content (i.e. context) seemed to work ok, but short basic actions? Pretty tricky. When I tried this in Turkish [CFJ 1460] I found that in doing Ruleset-to Turkish for the original message (http://www.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-business/2003-April/001309.html though shown in the archives with a bad character set) I found it was extremely difficult, even by hand, to translate strongly-loaded terms like "judgement". And putting together "call" and "judgement" in a way that matched both our sense of the word and Turkish choices for those words was doubly-hard and needed a good Turkish thesaurus. I ended up deciding (IIRC) that the concept of "shouting for justice", as a protester might do, was closer to what we meant by "CFJ" then "say to a judge" which is more like "testify" once a trial is underway. Maybe I should use a computer dictionary and end up with "raise an exception". In RL I've had to translate Turkish legal documents to English and vice versa (specifically to grant powers of attorney) and it takes/took a trained legal translator familiar with the specific legal systems. Murphy tried a word-by- word translated my Agoran message back into English and got it right; probably because (among the English synonyms for each Turkish word) a trained Agoran could pick out the ones that were Agoran-relevant. So in some cases, an Agoran without language knowledge, but with a word-by-word dictionary and a ruleset (e.g. legal rather than language knowledge), could do better than a "trained" translator. -Goethe
