i18n results
Thanks to everyone who responded to my recent post about internationalising this blog. The respondents were unanimous in saying that they were perfectly capable of working out, Googling for or asking about any points of difficulty, and inline explanations would probably just break the flow. So I'll stop worrying about it: but if anything's unclear, please ask.
neoanjou also made the very good point that literal translations (especially of units) often aren't very helpful if you don't have the context needed to interpret them. Is £10 a lot for a meal in a restaurant? Depends where you are.
Serendipitiously, I just came across a nice example of the dangers of literal translation. The label that came with the North Face duffel bag I won in a raffle last year proudly declares "Bomber Construction". Which doesn't mean it's shaped like a Flying Fortress: in climbers' argot, "bomber" is short for "bombproof", hence really solid, totally reliable, etc. Unfortunately, nobody told the French translator, who rendered it as "Structure de type « aviateur »" :-)
neoanjou also made the very good point that literal translations (especially of units) often aren't very helpful if you don't have the context needed to interpret them. Is £10 a lot for a meal in a restaurant? Depends where you are.
Serendipitiously, I just came across a nice example of the dangers of literal translation. The label that came with the North Face duffel bag I won in a raffle last year proudly declares "Bomber Construction". Which doesn't mean it's shaped like a Flying Fortress: in climbers' argot, "bomber" is short for "bombproof", hence really solid, totally reliable, etc. Unfortunately, nobody told the French translator, who rendered it as "Structure de type « aviateur »" :-)