The "meaning only"

Let's talk about the meaning only. This discussion is about experts and admins but might interest all users.

If the "meaning only" option has been chosen by the requester and if the translation has not a very good form but is keeping the meaning, we acept it without editing.

What if the request is not meaning only and the transaltion has a good meaning but a bad form ?

2 cases :

- The request was in fact "meaning only" but the option was not checked by the requester. You can guess this by looking at the profile of the requester and looking at the source text (very often it's a bad copy/paste of a recevived email).
In this case the admin or expert can change the request to "meaning only" and accept the translation

- The request is actually not meaning only. Then we come back to the usual case. You can edit it if ti's good engouh or reject it.


Does it sound OK to everybody ?

So if I understood well, I was right to put this text in "meaning only", for the reasons I told under the translation, and because of what has been said by this Bulgarian member whose name I don't remind, because being a native she doesn't recognize her mother language, even though it is understandable (short text).

Again, I think you're mixing a misguided philosophy up with serving the best interests of posters on cucumis, Francky.

Here's another example. If I'm writing a text on my computer at work, I cannot do any diacritics at all, so even in French, my text would have no accents. But that doesn't mean I'm sloppy or careless in writing it - it just means I'm hindered by my computer system from writing it the way I want to.

This happens to me all the time (not so much in French, but in Turkish and Greek) - if I were at home, you know I would much prefer to write the text in the proper alphabet, but if I'm at work, I don't have that choice.

I know many Turks here, for example, who don't ever have that choice - that is why so many Turkish texts are written without diacritics - even canaydemir, the new Turkish expert, cannot write in Turkish from his computer without typing it in Word first and then pasting it in here. That certainly doesn't mean that he doesn't care about the correct form of his mother tongue.

Thus, I am strongly against automatically making anything posted not in the correct alphabet "meaning only", because I don't think we can make the assumption that the requester doesn't care about correctness.

Kafetzou, when you tell "I am strongly against automatically making anything posted not in the correct alphabet "meaning only", because I don't think we can make the assumption that the requester doesn't care about correctness.
".
Are you talking about translations or source texts ?

For translations, if there are not requested under the "meaning only" option, they must be entered with the correct diatrics. I think we can't acept them with wrong diatrics. Do you agree ?
I'm surprised that your office keyboard doesn't allow you to enter turkish diatrics.
Did you try these methods :
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/turkish.html#keyboard
or
http://www.elgin.free-online.co.uk/turk_keyb_down2.htm

Sorry for the confusion - I was talking about source texts only. This conversation was a continuation of one Francky and I were having under a translation.

I'll try the websites you suggest from work on Monday and let you know how it goes.

Well, I must say I do agree with Francky. A language is a complex system and the way to write it is a part of this system. Just think about the Turkish, Kafetzou! Didn't they need to add some special signs to Latin alphabet (and to Arabic alphabet too) to transcript their language?
The cyrillic alphabet as well was created by Cyril and Methodius taking the Greek alphabet, modifying it and adding some special letters so as to make it possible to write Slavic languages.
By the way, there is a "scientific" transliteration from cyrillic to latin characters, but it is not often used, since nowadays people prefer the English transcription , which is easier (no diacritics) but is inaccurate, because there is not one latin letter for each letter of the cyrillic.
I have just found a Bulgarian text written in latin characters plus the numbers 4 and 6. I asked Ghery, who has translated it into Italian, and she told me that 4 is short for "ch" (English pronounce) and 6 is instead of "sh".
I mean, we can translate all sort of writings, but those which are not written in the proper way with the proper alphabet should be translated as meaning only.
What difference would it make for the requester?
The only exception, I think, could be languages "in transition", like Turkestani languages of former sovietic republics, for example.

I think it's slightly more of an individual problem than this. It really depends on how big a difference there will be in the final translation, i.e. will the translation suffer because it is meaning only, and will it matter if the translation suffers. If the submitter found something online, or got it via e-mail, the misspelling and wrong alphabet aren't his fault. That doesn't mean he doesn't deserve as good a translation as he can get. So yeah, it's more individual than what just one rule could cover, and, unless the submitter is a proven lazy bum, he shouldn't have to pay for it.

Thank you Maski - finally somebody who understands what I meant!!!

Apple, you know how I feel about correctness - please don't misunderstand - I'm in no way advocating accepting translations not done with the proper alphabet - I'm just saying that the submission of texts written in the Latin alphabet, sometimes without diacritics, is often because of technical obstacles, not because the submitter is lazy!

Here's another example: Up until very recently, no-one had the capability of writing e-mail in Greek. Because of this, a complicated system was devised to allow people to send e-mails written with correct orthography in Greek. The problems were with the Greek letters ξ, θ, and a few others, so numbers were used to replace those (ksi = 3, theta = 8, etc.). Thus the following sentence:

μια ξανθή γυναίκα με φώναξε

would be:

mia 3av8n guvaika me fwva3e

It took me about three times as long to write the sentence in the modified Latin orthography as it did in Greek letters, but I used to do that. Many of my correspondents didn't - instead they would write the sentence the way it sounds:

mia ksanthi gynaika me fonakse

The same thing was true in Turkish, where capital I was used in place of the dotless i, g followed by a circumflex accent was used instead of the soft g, and s followed by a comma was used instead of the ÅŸ, but many people didn't know about this system, so they just wrote without the special characters, and many people still do - not out of laziness, but out of lack of access to a computer with unicode.

There are many computers that can write in Turkish or Greek, but not in unicode, so that what has been written on those computers cannot be read on a website or in an e-mail.

Thus, although Turkish and Greek do not have new orthographies, like Azeri or Turkmen, the ability to use the proper orthography on the internet is still not firmly established.

OK - that was kind of long.

You may be right about that (individual problem),translating "meaning only" doesn't obligatory mean the translation has got to be messy, so that the solution also may be individual, up to the one who translates as well. Note that you should have used "..." when you say "pay for it", because here it is free, no money inside the site, but a way to share knowledges of languages, exchanging services, it means that there aren't customers at one hand, and employees at the other, we're all equal here, so that if some member demands a nice translation, the text to be translated should be correct as well. You can't be too demanding when you're submiting a mess to translation, I'm sorry. I've reoriented several times already texts which were submited in the normal mode to the "meaning only" mode, and I'm not speaking about texts received or picked up on the net, but texts quite short with an astronomic quantity of mistakes in them, and these texts were submited in the submiter's mother language. It means that even translated in the "meaning only" mode, these texts couldn't be as messy as they are in the source language. All that for free! Personaly, if I've got to translate a "meaning only" text, I'll do my best, same as for a regular translation...

Sorry, Francky - I was editing my post while you were submitting yours.

It's ok, I'm quite long to post, this explains that.

One more thing in response to your post, Francky:

If I retyped every Turkish translation request that was posted without the proper diacritics, I would be spending all of my time on Cucumis doing that!

If I glance through the translations requested from Turkish to all languages, it's about 50% that are written with the proper diacritics.

Better than Romanians! Romanians it's 90% submited without diacritics; And it's too bad I don't know Turkish, I would have done it. Note that I already spent a big part of my time doing that job with Romanian members(warnings under texts, in the comment area, personal messages, removing texts), I don't know if it is because of that, but there are less texts submited, and translated without diacritics, maybe they passed on one another that on this site there was a dragoon and a monster who were merciless with the diacritics ignorers...
Here is onesample of the kind of texts about which I use to check the meaning only box ...

OK question: In this translation the requester asks for it to be done using Latin characters (I assume that, since he doesn't want Cyrillic ones he doesn't want Greek either). Should I switch his request to meaning only?

I personaly think that...yes! because I've seen that there was already a Bulgarian translation that has been refused, which was also typed in latin characters. The evaluator, (let's say that the translation to come is gonna be slightly different) who already refused the first translation, is going to base him/herself on which kind of criteria, to say that one is wrong and the other is right? is there a convention that tells "this Bulgarian" text has got to be writen this way in latin characters, and not that way?

To Francky (about the French text): That one's all mixed up - the writer clearly could have written it properly. But how do you know that the writer is the submitter?

To irini: In this case, the submitter is Greek, and she has even written her own name in Greek, so I would say she wants the Greek translation written in the Greek alphabet. It's the Bulgarian one that she doesn't want written in Cyrillic.

In general, I still strongly feel that we should not change a person's translation request to "meaning only" - that should be up to the requester only.

Actually, the newer Bulgarian translation has gotten around the problem elegantly - take a look.

I've seen the translator(the one to be evaluated) did well, she wrote in Latin alphabet in the comments area, and used the main frame to type it in cyrillic as well! good job!

kafetzou, I forgot to answer your 19:28 question : the submiter is the one who types the text, but maybe is it a copy-paste, in which case she should have edited (but maybe has she got problems with orthograph, grammar and all..)?
Wow! kids really have got a problem with writen languages nowadays, "thanks to" high technology, sms style is now the way they write or type. Would you believe I heard a French politician saying that to enter secondary school it will be required from the pupil that he knows to read and write!? (11 years old) it is about at this age that kids get their first cellphone... "Can't stop progress" !

Francky, maybe the submitter doesn't know French very well - maybe that's why she wants it translated! I know she says French is her preferred target language, but she has a Turkish name.

Also, I agree that sms (as well as other things, such as the "whole language approach" to teaching English in schools here - I train native speakers of English to teach English, when most of the time they have little or no knowledge of their own grammar!) is responsible for a general decline in people's ability to write their own language correctly, but what I'm talking about is a completely different situation - where the person may be able to write the language perfectly well, but does not have access to the technology which would allow the posting of the correct text on the internet (or in an e-mail).

Francky, you know that I respect your opinion very much, but it seems you are missing my main point here, which is that it is often a matter of a lack of access to technology, not laziness or a lack of education.