Hi Wolfgang -
> @Loren: as a german speaker I get the impression that this text was
wrritten or translated by a
> non-native speaker and then retyped by someone who does not know german.
I quickly scanned the text, and while I only know enough German to read a
schematic, it immediately seemed to me this was some sort of normal American
chain-mail or get-rich-quick letter. Certainly the quotes of "satisfied
customers" quoted addresses in places that are not predominantly
German-speaking; so I assumed that at leas that much text had to be
translated.
I made the assumption that possibly someone local that spoke both languages
had received one of those and translated it to German.
> We have all these nice extra characters like in "übler Spam ärgert uns" -
and where the keyboard
> (or other constraints) make them impossible, they would be replaced by
two-letter
> combinations "ueber Spam aergert uns". So in fact one in five words in
that text is misspelled
I completely missed this, and it is of course obvious now that you mention
it. Even with keyboards missing the unlauts and whatnot there is usually a
method of entering those characters, although I suppose it may be more work
than it is worth. I can remember how to do this on an Amiga, but never
learned how to do it on a PC. :-)
Loren
PS: On the subject of no German rules, SA is somewhat of a volunteer effort,
and I'm sure they would be happy to accept some. Although they may have
some trouble effectively mass-checking and scoring them.
We have at least one native German-speaker in SARE, and I'm sure we would be
more than open to acquiring people with non-English language abilities, a
willingness to write and test rules, and perhaps most importantly, a corpus
of mail to test against.
We have not released any non-English rules at this point, but it is not from
lack of desire -- it is merely that we do not have the necessary experience
with non-English spam to be able to do a workman-like job of it.
