Glitter and poverty of translated literature

- It is better not to read at all than that.

Do you often read technical literature? Literature, but not manuals on habre or bugreporta on githabe? And when you read, in what language do you prefer to do it (if you have the opportunity to choose, of course)? Which version do you prefer, the Russian or English original?
')
In some circles there is an opinion that gives snobbery and elitism that reading (watching movies, playing games) is only in the language of Shakespeare and nothing else. Many others find it difficult to check first on the topic of whether they are simply arrogant or have any serious problems with technical literature. Trite because of poor command of the original language.


Another complication is the area of ​​knowledge around which all this happens. Often, it is not easy to recognize the boundary, where a lack of understanding of complex data structures or new development methodologies themselves translates into a misunderstanding of the text that the translator composed. For example, a quote from one pretty fresh book:

In high school, he began creating dynamic websites when the Internet was still relatively young. He then moved on to developing software for the healthcare and telecommunications industry at a local company, studying computer science at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the end, he went to work at Red Hat, initially developing the open source implementation of the Google App Engine API, which used Red Hat JBoss midrange products. He also worked or participated in such projects as CDI / Weld, Infinispan / Jboss DataGrid, etc.
Since the end of 2014, he has been part of the Red Hat Cloud Enablement team, where his responsibilities include updating new developments at Kubernetes and related technologies and ensuring that the Kubernetes and OpenShift capabilities are maximized in the mid-tier company software.

If you didn’t get sick from the passage “initially developing the open source implementation of the Google App Engine API,” then surely there were questions about what kind of “mid-level company” all of a sudden. Or what, for example, means “updating of new developments”. Referring to the original text:

Since the late 2014, he has been a team that has been able to use his team .

It turns out, in fact, this is not a mid-level company. And we are talking about the software company. And no one forced him to "update new developments" - in fact, he needs to constantly be aware of all new developments.

Or another example from another book:

In 2007, I contacted Yahoo management about a position that was “a little bit on development” and “a little bit on exploitation.” It was about the vacancy of a senior service engineer responsible for creating and maintaining a multi-tenant, hosted, distributed and geographically replicated key-value data warehouse called Sherpa.

“Multi-tenant, hosted, distributed and geographically replicated data storage” - you can immediately understand what this mess means, or you have to first translate back into English to realize exactly which familiar terms were so richest localized to the great and mighty?

Does this help in simple learning? Honestly, not so much. Do you want to spend a lot of money, in general, on thick linguistic jungles, in the depths of which is a hut with treasured clay tablets hidden? Do not want. I want something else: to have access to a set of simple and clear texts, the most difficult part of which would be the ideas presented by the author, and not the strange language constructs built up by the translator.

We are trying to figure out why this happened.

How did it happen? Has it always been like this? Can we somehow avoid such incidents in the future? I would suggest that the issues of a low level of language competence be left outside the scope of this discussion, since we can hardly influence it directly. There are just good translators, but not very good ones. Like programmers. And dentists. In general, anyone.

But what additional difficulties are encountered even by bilinguals who are seriously savvy in both languages, when they decide to do the translation of IT literature? Information technologies have grown dramatically over the past 10-15 years, both horizontally and vertically. There are a lot of new professions, each has its own separate specialization. Due to the linguistic inertia of human perception in many related professions, the same terms are used, which, however, have a different meaning. And in order to understand how to properly use and translate a particular term, you need not only to be proficient in the language, but also a good idea to understand a particular field and subdivisions of the information industry.

Roughly speaking, at the same time, the universal view of the “programmer” ceased to exist (which is to raise both the server and the script, and the motherboard rewinder was rewired), and the universal “technical translator” also ceased to exist. Therefore, it is no longer enough to be "just a translator." It would be nice to be, first of all, a technical specialist who, as a supplement, is fluent in languages. And this, as you understand, is a completely different story. Not all good technical specialists have enough language skills. And even if they do, they are far from always interested in doing this kind of work - they are more attracted by technical achievements than humanitarian ones.

“And before, before, how good it was!” (C)

The methodology of “translations” of new words is now spread by simple substitution of already existing Anglicism. For example, a commit (a more or less normal translation of “fixation” is almost universally supplanted), a build, a deployment - the list can be kept endlessly. Most likely, this situation has developed due to the acceleration of the pace of the emergence of new technologies. Translation, just like any other reactive system, simply cannot keep up with a given pace. And by the time any text reached the translation by professionals, techies have already formed a deeply rooted jargon - and the translation of the term “commit” by the word “fixation” will hurt the reader’s eye.

But this does not mean that you should put up with a similar situation! There are excellent examples of high-quality, deeply thought-out translation. From the examples you can take the "thread" - "thread". The literal translation - "thread" - suggests that, most likely, at the dawn of the formation of English-language terminology, it was an association with a loom with a bunch of parallel strained threads. In the Russian language, “execution in a few threads” sounds very incomprehensible, but “execution in several streams” is quite another matter. Here the semantics is preserved, because the flow is a constant movement (calculation), which is not the case with the thread. And it sounds quite familiar ("on the highway the cars move in several streams").

Another example of a successfully localized term is “pipeline” = “pipeline”. “Pipeline” is a pipeline, the essence of the term (rendering pipeline, CI / CD pipeline) is the processing where some action takes place at each node: depending on the conditions, the “valves” can be opened and opened and the processing goes through the other pipe. Throughout the "pipeline" can be placed some "sensors" that control the process. The word is chosen very well, but the direct translation, the “pipeline of drawing” does not sound concise enough. “Conveyor” in this case is an ideally matched word, except with a different shade (convey - to transmit, and through the pipes it “flows by itself”), but without losing the main meaning.

How to live?

What do we offer from our side? We offer the very unique fusion of technical competencies with high-quality language skills. We are ready to allocate the time of our technical experts to bring the semantic content of the translated texts to an ideal state.

In the process of working on translations, we have to spend a lot of time in discussions on how to localize certain terms. In this regard, it would be nice to start collecting a general glossary of new terminology, for later use both in your own translations and in translations of colleagues in the workshop. This glossary should not be just a collection of words; First of all, it is intended to explain why such a term is chosen, rather than similar to it, how it fits into the language context - well, our technical tradition. Without blind and thoughtless tracing foreign terminology.

We are planning to do just such a glossary. To begin with, apparently, this will be a series of articles with an overview of collections of terms, the history of their appearance and development, as well as the objects behind them. Subsequently, in each book of our publishing house there will be a separate section describing how we worked on the terminology used in this book. As the material is collected, a separate edition is likely to be published on the topic of the problems of the Russian language in modern information technology translation. Well, for now, you can pre-order our first book, Event-Oriented Systems Design by Ben Stopford.

And what thoughts do you have about the situation in translated technical literature? Are there any terms particularly dear to the heart that, in your opinion, were perfectly translated into Russian? Or maybe there is a particularly hated? :)