Survey posted 2000-05-26 23:49 by Andy.

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(Third Post in Five minutes)

I was reading all the conflict over the language barrier when i had an idea: Ticalc.org could use a translator like the one at babelfish.altavista.org to translate all its pages. It could put a little control panel on the toolbar to change it to french,dutch,swedish,spanish,german,etc. Then you could either remove the thing in your preferences and/or change the default language. I think this would be a big help to all our foriegn friends. The translations would not be perfect, of course, but they would be good enough to get the general gist of what is being said. (I know, i rant too much.)

--meek

I think we had a nice discussion about Babelfish. The result was, as I remember, that everyone should learn enough English. And that's really no problem, considering the fact that we all learn it at school. That is, everyone who is smart enough to use a graphing calculator.

Yep, I totally agree, I mean English is pretty much the easiest language to learn, and it is nearly a "must" to speak english in todays world (for work, Internet, trade etc.). Plus, even if you only have a basic knowledge of the english language you should be able to understand most of whats written here on ticalc.org. And about the babbelfish idea, I think it would only mess up the whole thing even more (if everyone would write posts in their native language the whole discussion would become unreadable in the end).

Contary to what many people think, English is not at all easy to learn. It's absurdly easy, of course, if that happens to be your first language. But as a second language, it's practically impossible to learn. It's second in complexity only to Japanese. (Japanese has an insane number of symbols for words, not to mention the language itself.) English has all kinds of crazy rules about verb endings, changing y to i, idioms, tenses, and those impossible-to-master exceptions to the rule. The time it takes to even gain a rudimentary command of a second language is pretty great. Of the 800 people at my high school, about half of the people who take Spanish or French (two of the easiest) either fail out or drop out because 'it's too hard'. Asking people to learn a language many times as complex as that just to share their ideas with us is not going to go over well. They're just going to share their ideas somewhere else.

As for the problem with people posting in their native language, it would be easy to have a little radio box at the bottom of the post screen reading "I am posting in English, Spanish, French, German, Swedish, etc." That way whatever program they used would be able to recognize that and fix it for the English-Speaking folk.

--meek

(Sorry for the long post (again))
;)

Hmm, I still believe that english is the easiest language to learn. I grew up in switzerland where I learned Swiss-German (contrary to general beliefs it IS different than german), from 3rd grade on I had to learn German (which I continued until 9th grade), from 6 grade on I took french (I still take it, I'm in 11th grade now), I started taking English in 9th grade and from all the languages I speak I have to say English was the easiest one to learn, I'm most fluent in Swiss-German, then English, German and lastly French. French and German are by FAR harder to learn than English, they have more crazy rules than any other language I know of (well other than all the asian languages, I actually started learning Japanes a while ago, but I lost interest in it). So here you go, I don't know if this applies to everyone, or if it even makes sense. So :-P
And "sorry" for the long post

The reason it's easy for you, in particular, is because you're Swiss, which is similar to German. The English language is deeply rooted in the language of the Germanic tribes. If you read some of the really old Enlgish this will become apparrent.

--meek

I'm portuguese and I've learned English by myself when I was about 6/7 years old...

---
Cd_Slayer

you're better at english than a lot of other people here, for only two years of learning it... :-)

>(Japanese has an insane number of symbols for words

Not always true...while there is kanji (the "word symbols") you only have to know a small fraction of them to get by. There is also an phonetic alphabet.

>not to mention the language itself.)

The language just seems hard because it isn't the usual European language order we're used to. As well, there are only two irregular verbs in Japanese, and verb conjugation is even easier than it is in Spanish or French for the most part ... just take off a letter and add two or three more.

Only two, huh? Wow...that's amazing.

>The language just seems hard because it isn't the usual European language order we're used to.

--which is part of my point. People that have grown up in the orient have an easier time with it because they're used to it. For a Westerner, however, the transition is difficult, because we're not used to the structure of it.

--meek

Chao ong!

Heh, i say everyone should learn vietnamese...it is the best asian language...then chinese.

-Corey

"English has all kinds of crazy rules about verb endings, changing y to i, idioms, tenses, and those impossible-to-master exceptions to the rule"

And Spanish and French don't? I speak Spanish (I'm Mexican and have learned from my parents) and French (to an extent; however I'm in French 3 when I should be in French 2 if it means anything to you).

Therefore, I know that both languages have all those crazy rules and such

I know BOTH languages have some wierd stuff, but English tends to have more. Exceptions to the rule are much more rampant in English also. I've taken Spanish as well, and it can be difficult, but all the language teachers i've talked to confirm that English is the second hardest to pick up as a second language.

--meek

Hmm Considering that English has one of the smallest alphabets (least letters) it should be that hard to learn I mean who is it Russia or one of those contires over there has over 200 letters in its alphabet that would be pretty hard to learn....and think of how hard it would be to guess on our spellin tests.

<snip>English has one of the smallest alphabets.</snip>

Not true. Arabic, Swahili, Greek, and Hebrew all have smaller alphabets than English (I think.) No European language (including Russian) has an alphabet more than 35 letters. The size of the alphabet shouldn't be a serious problem for most languages (except Chinese and Japanese which have thousands of characters)

Russian uses the Cyrilic alphabet and has 33 letters.

don't forget those nasty little things called cases. (past, present, future progressive, etc.)

About the babelfish idea: The stuff babelfish puts out is hard to read and sometimes completely impossible to understand. I don't know if there's a better translator available, but I kind of doubt it. Until automated translator technology gets better, I think we should stick with one language for our web sites. It is a good concept though, if only the technology was better.

I agree with you: Babelfish translations suck the big one. I used to use it, only to discover that it gave translations that were worse than mine.

I'm not sure what you're trying to translate...
It works fine for me. The only problem is grammar (obviously.) But the point is that you understand the basic gist of it, not to translate it into rhyming verse. (Note subtle use of minimal sarcasm) Maybe it's because i've gone to a school where people use such tortured english that our first unit in english is "Fire-Making 101". But the point is that it's better than not being able to make sense of it at all.

--meek