Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from?

[coppice]

What I find most curious here is that the Chinese can actually read those characters at the scale that they appear on my computer screen. Either they have very sharp eyesight or they must have a different type font size setting on their computers.

Its just a matter of familiarity. I didn't start learning to read Chinese until I was about 40. Not knowing any, I started out needing every element of the character to be clearly defined. As I started to grasp what makes sense as part of a character and what doesn't my need for clarity relaxed. I can't cope with the level of poor clarity that my children, raised reading Chinese, can, but I have gradually expanded what I can read. Note: doctor's writing is very hard to read in any language.

[coppice]

A lot of this is centered around Chinese, but they do not have an exclusive on terminology differences and confusion. Back in the 80s I worked in a TV station when the Japanese companies, like Sony and Ikegami, started to make equipment sales to the US TV market. I am talking about professional equipment, not consumer. This equipment came with thick manuals where maintenance and set-up procedures were explained on a step by step basis. Often there would be two or more thick manuals for a given item of equipment so there was a lot in them.

One such manual, translated from the original Japanese, that I recall had a cover title that immediately told you that you were going to have real problems understanding what was within. That title read, "Color Handi Lookie System".

It was not unusual to see small groups of our TV engineering staff standing around for a half hour or longer trying to understand just one sentence or phrase in that manual. And the item of equipment was stuck on a maintenance bench until the meaning was figured out. With our people afraid of messing things up to where only the factory could fix it, procedures that should have taken only a few minutes, wound up taking all week.

The translations did get better with later generations of equipment. I am sure there was some unpleasant feedback on that manual.

PS: If you haven't figured it out, "Color Handi Lookie System" meant "Hand-Held, Color, TV Camera".

That was the period when native English speakers set up agencies in Japan, not to translate Japanese documentation into English, but to clean up the terrible translations a second language speaker had produced. I used to know someone who seemed to make very good money doing that. A native English speaker, with some technical proficiency, and very little ability to speak Japanese. Just enough to be able to question the original Japanese author and try to figure out what they really meant.

[coppice]

"電單車" is a traditional Chinese term. In mainland Mandarin, motorcycle is transliterated as "摩托车".

True, but in conversation 電單車 gets contracted to 電車, and in HK you are often left wondering whether someone meant the tram service or a motorbike.

[harerod]

...
Even I as a native Chinese speaker can't find a reasonable explanation, but I know that the term "火" here means "electricity". Relatedly, in Chinese, the live wire is called "火线", literally means "fire wire".

Only through learning secondary languages one starts to see the quirks his mother tongue...

Soo - how fast in Chinese fire wire? 
Is there a rule to when 火 fire and when 電 lightning is used for electricity? Reading or meaning wise?
How did the lightning end up in automobiles? Fiery and noisy?

[harerod]

Quote from: EPAIII on Today at 09:29:15

A lot of this is centered around Chinese, but they do not have an exclusive on terminology differences and confusion. Back in the 80s I worked in a TV station when the Japanese companies, like Sony and Ikegami, started to make equipment sales to the US TV market. I am talking about professional equipment, not consumer. This equipment came with thick manuals where maintenance and set-up procedures were explained on a step by step basis. Often there would be two or more thick manuals for a given item of equipment so there was a lot in them.

One such manual, translated from the original Japanese, that I recall had a cover title that immediately told you that you were going to have real problems understanding what was within. That title read, "Color Handi Lookie System".

It was not unusual to see small groups of our TV engineering staff standing around for a half hour or longer trying to understand just one sentence or phrase in that manual. And the item of equipment was stuck on a maintenance bench until the meaning was figured out. With our people afraid of messing things up to where only the factory could fix it, procedures that should have taken only a few minutes, wound up taking all week.

The translations did get better with later generations of equipment. I am sure there was some unpleasant feedback on that manual.

PS: If you haven't figured it out, "Color Handi Lookie System" meant "Hand-Held, Color, TV Camera".

That was the period when native English speakers set up agencies in Japan, not to translate Japanese documentation into English, but to clean up the terrible translations a second language speaker had produced. I used to know someone who seemed to make very good money doing that. A native English speaker, with some technical proficiency, and very little ability to speak Japanese. Just enough to be able to question the original Japanese author and try to figure out what they really meant.

Honestly - that sounds like my dream job. I offer technical translations into my native German and into English from several languages (e.g. Japanese, French). Most of the time I would be deemed too expensive. However, quite often good technical documentation is a must.

Back in the 1980's was the time when I started collecting interesting translations. Documentation wording had to endure several hops, before it arrived in, for lack of a better word, German. We imagined how that text had started out in Korean, was then translated into Japanese, from there to English and finally to German.
From the top of my head, some nice examples:
-> a calculator able to work with "Zauberzahlen" (magic numbers, 0..F, you know?)
-> that wonderful device could also figure out the "eingebildeten" components (conceited, from double meaning of the German word for "imaginery") of "komplizierten Zahlen" ("complicated Numbers" complex)

From a monitor manual we had a whole load of gems like: 
-> don't water the technical equipment
-> do gruesomely abuse not by walk on power cord (German text was: "niemals wandeln auf Stromkabel um grausam misshandeln")

You get the idea, same as DNA got, when he gave Dirk Gently that I-Ching calculator.

[TimFox]

David Henry Hwang is an American playwright of Chinese ancestry, best known as the author of "M Butterfly".
Back in 2011, we attended the premiere production of "Chinglish" in Chicago, done in English and Mandarin.
The plot involves the interaction between an American businessman in China, and his translators and intended Chinese customers.
It had an interesting use of "supertitles" (which are now ubiquitous in opera performances):  the titles showed the literal translation back into English of the Chinese translator's translation of the English text.
"I represent a family-owned company in Ohio" became "He is from an insignificant company"

[coppice]

David Henry Hwang is an American playwright of Chinese ancestry, best known as the author of "M Butterfly".
Back in 2011, we attended the premiere production of "Chinglish" in Chicago, done in English and Mandarin.
The plot involves the interaction between an American businessman in China, and his translators and intended Chinese customers.
It had an interesting use of "supertitles" (which are now ubiquitous in opera performances):  the titles showed the literal translation back into English of the Chinese translator's translation of the English text.
"I represent a family-owned company in Ohio" became "He is from an insignificant company"

Translation is a very imprecise tool. The fact that many of the "great works" to read in English started life in Russian has as much to do with the translation work falling into the hands of great bilingual writers as it does to the original Russian authors.

[SiliconWizard]

The fun thing is that it absolutely doesn't prevent them from having an impressive economic growth with international business.

[EPAIII]

Nor will it prevent an economic collapse there. It will be interesting to see which predictions come true.

I am neither predicting nor encouraging anything here, just an observer.

The fun thing is that it absolutely doesn't prevent them from having an impressive economic growth with international business.

[pdenisowski]

pdenisowski, first of all - thanks for your effort. Out of curiosity - have you met Jim Breen? He is a hero for many students of Japanese.

Jim and I go way, way back (early 1990s).  In fact, I think I was Jim's first friend on Facebook  

I was a contributor to EDICT and Jim eventually folded my COMPDIC (Japanese-English computer dictionary) file into his main EDICT file

http://nihongo.monash.edu/compdic_doc.html

Jim was also one of my heroes when I was studying Japanese (using a Canon Wordtank and a beat up copy of Nelson's dictionary)

[pdenisowski]

I offer technical translations into my native German and into English from several languages (e.g. Japanese, French). Most of the time I would be deemed too expensive. However, quite often good technical documentation is a must.

I did translation work to support myself (financially) when I was working on my engineering degree: it wasn't great money even back then, but it paid (some of) the bills.  Technical translation jobs always paid better than non-technical jobs

This was (long) before machine translation, electronic dictionaries, Google translate, etc.  I haven't done translation work in a long time, but I can't imagine trying to make a living doing it now.  Some of the AI translation tools are frighteningly good, even for more obscure languages or technical topics.

My feeling is that in the future, translation as a profession will be limited primarily to books / literature, where you really need a human translator for style, nuance, etc.

(I actually did translate an entire book once:  https://www.si.edu/object/siris_sil_1089190)

[harerod]

Quote from: harerod on 2023-11-17, 19:25:23

pdenisowski, first of all - thanks for your effort. Out of curiosity - have you met Jim Breen? He is a hero for many students of Japanese.

Jim and I go way, way back (early 1990s).  In fact, I think I was Jim's first friend on Facebook  

I was a contributor to EDICT and Jim eventually folded my COMPDIC (Japanese-English computer dictionary) file into his main EDICT file

http://nihongo.monash.edu/compdic_doc.html

Jim was also one of my heroes when I was studying Japanese (using a Canon Wordtank and a beat up copy of Nelson's dictionary)

　Wow, reading your reply gave me goosebumps. Without the aid of a computer and the free resources available online, learning any Japanese  would most likely have been beyond my capabilities. I certainly noticed COMPDIC inside JMDICT, being an EE myself. Those collections are the foundation for tools that I use daily, such as Rikaichamp, Yomichan and Jisho.org, to name a few examples.
I'd like to thank you again for your effort.

I learn Japanese via English, simply because of the quality of the available material. Nevertheless, here's a link to a collection of my notes regarding Japanese in German, which mostly quotes sources in English or Japanese. http://www.harerod.de/nihongo/index.html

[harerod]

... on translations ...
... Ernst Messerschmid ...

Well, I am offering technical translations, because of all the hilarious stuff that I have seen. The output from professional technical translation services must be checked, if one wants to avoid embarrassment. As can be seen not only in this thread... 
Learning a language is about understanding your foreign partner. Something that a translation tool cannot do for humans. I appreciate modern tools, but I see them as an extension to the basic abilities of a human being.

I also appreciate the effort of all those guys who use their L2-English, rather than Google Translate, to contribute to this forum.

I am pretty sure that I read this book in German. Messerschmid / Furrer, those names were well known to nerdy German kids back in 1985. STS-61-A, the penultimate flight of OV-099 Challenger.

[soldar]

Welding, soldering and blazing are not distinguished outside technical fields, all metal-joining techniques are known as "焊接" or "焊". Hence the mistranslation.

That's the same in French, for example.

To weld or to solder is both translated the same: "souder".

So if you hope to buy a soldering iron/station, don't ask for a "machine à souder" at your local hardware store or Conrad or you will be shown a welder  (soldering iron is "fer à souder" - literally "iron for  welding/soldering").

Same in Spanish. Weld, braze, solder and sometimes even "glue" are "soldar", from latin solidus, to make solid.

Most people do not realize how the language you speak conditions your perception of the world. But words are not single points with a one to one correspondence in other languages. Each word covers some area and that area can be covered by different words in another language and viceversa.  Each word has a lot fo connotations and relations that it may not have in another language. 

An english-speaking person might thing it is strange that another language does not distinguish between welding, brazing and soldering and use the same word for all three.

A native Spanish speaker might think it is strange that English speakers use the word "wall" for what in Spanish we distinguish many different categories. City walls, garden walls, load bearing walls, non-load bearing walls, retaining walls, etc. are just all "walls" in English.

A common example is colors. Where one culture sees two different colors another culture sees two shades of the same color. Also the separation of two colors may exist in different points. Where does a mixture of blue-green become green?

We have light blue and dark (navy) blue and consider them two shades of the same color. And yet we see dark orange and call it brown and consider it a different color altogether.

[soldar]

English as she is spoke

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

English as She Is Spoke, is a 19th-century book written by Pedro Carolino, with some editions crediting José da Fonseca as a co-author. It was intended as a Portuguese–English conversational guide or phrase book. However, because the provided translations are usually inaccurate or unidiomatic, it is regarded as a classic source of unintentional humour in translation.

The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation, which has led to many idiomatic expressions being translated ineptly. For example, Carolino translates the Portuguese phrase chover a cântaros as "raining in jars", when an analogous English idiom is available in the form of "raining buckets".

Mark Twain said of English as She Is Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.