The "meaning only"

How about this one - I've hesitated to translate it because I'm not sure the original French is correct.

Yes, I understand that, I can figure out that someone doesn't have access to the technology that would allow him/her to post correctly, but I'm in doubt about the frequency of such a situation comparated to the other kinds of lack.
Note that if I can see the lack of technology in a post, my behaviour is going to be helpfull to the submiter of a text. Then to come back to the example I gave you (French text)I've let a message with the text correctly writen, telling her it was up to her, and that if she wanted a regular translation, she just got to type the text the way I typed it, have a look
here...
About the other French text, which is a kind of a poetry, it is correctly writen, I've done a translation of it about which I'm sure it wouldn't be a good one, especially when trying to translate "brasier ardent" (live glowing coal!...Do you say that in English?)I've got no idea about the correct way to translate it in English, but if you want I can deliver you the raw translation...

Very interesting discussion. It seems the "meaning only" feature is not very clear for now .

Maski told "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."

My answer is : Yes, a "meaning only" translation can suffer because it's meaning only. The meaning must be perfect but the form can be approximative. A meaning only translation can be accepted even when there are problems with capital letters, marks, little mistakes, etc...


Why should we change a request to meaning only ?

Technically speaking I want to recall the 2 following points.

- "Meaning only" translations are not considered to be beautiful and clean translation. As a consequence, they might be removed from our database after they are done and after a couple of weeks. We don't want to keep and show to our visitors, texts full of mistakes. More over the database is growing fast and it will be quickly necessary to cut the worst texts.

- Another important consequence, when a meaning only translation is accepted, it's not taken into account in the language equivalences which are used to set the cost of each request depending on the language.

Having said this, all bad source texts or wrong alphabet source text, should be changed to "meaning only", in order not to corrupt the language equivalences and not to keep unaccurate texts in our database.

But, we must not forget that the "meaning only" option is a choice by the submitter. If we change it to "meaning only", and considering that the translation can suffer from this, we must think about it twice before doing so.


There is a case in which you can turn it to "meaning only" without too many risks : The target language of the translation is the native language of the submitter. The source text was certinly found on an email or website and copied/pasted on cucumis. We can changed it to meaning only.

In the case the source text is bad but a "meaning only" translation would not satisfy the submitter, I see 2 choices, and I'm not sure what is the better :
1) We turn it to "meaning only" as a " little punishement", and we can/should post a message : "This request has been turned to "meaning only" because the source text is full of mistakes / is using the wrong alphabet / etc..."
2) We do the same things we were doing when the "meaning only" feature was not. Asking the submitter to edit (or editing ourselves when it's minor mistakes), or removing the request after several warnings. Note that adminstrators can put the request in quarantine without removing it (it's also a new feature), waiting it's edited by the submitter.

What a long post I can go for a walk now

There's something I don't understand. I thought the difference between normal translations and "meaning only" ones was simply what jp has just said: the formal corrispondence between the two texts (also for language equivalence). So, the "meaning only" can't be listed in the Official Record of cucumis only for formal reason.
Anyway, if the source text, for any reason, is not submitted in the correct form and gets the "meaning only" label, I don't think that this must be seen as a punishment, and so the text can be translated inaccurately.
On the contrary the translation can be more difficult, because it is more difficult to understand the source text.
So, unless there is one or more words incomprehensible, it should be translated in the best way one can.
I realize very well that some texts are submitted by people that don't understand that text. They should not be punished, we must do the best we can do.
And if is not the case and one is submitting a "bad" text in his own language, I still don't know what I am supposed to do.
By the way I made a request some time ago, that the native language must be shown on the personal profiles (now only the country where one lives is shown, but this doesn't mean that that person is a native of that country, or the country can be multilingual)

For the native language in the profile, you're right I will add it soon.


For me, "meaning only" requests can be translated by non native speakers. That means they will be less fluent, less clean than normal translations. For example if I want to tanslate a part of my Curiculum Vitae in english, I would not submit it as meaning only.

The idea of "meaning only" request is to save the time and efforts of translators and experts to make a perfect translation when it's not needed by the submitter.

We should spend more efforts on translating a CV or an important letter, than translating a quote from a chat.

Francky, you said "Yes, I understand that, I can figure out that someone doesn't have access to the technology that would allow him/her to post correctly, but I'm in doubt about the frequency of such a situation comparated to the other kinds of lack."

Why do you doubt the frequency of this??? Please read my 14 April 2007 18:29 post to see the reasons why this is VERY frequent in Turkish and Greek.

jp, I hope you had a nice walk. You said, "1) We turn it to "meaning only" as a " little punishement" ..."

Why do we want to punish people for this??? At least in Turkish and Greek, it's usually not their fault.

apple, for me the idea of "meaning only" encompasses a few more things:

If a translation were marked "meaning only",

1) I would feel freer to translate into a language in which I am not totally fluent.

2) As an expert, I would validate it without editing it if the meaning seemed OK.

P.S. Thanks, Francky for the tip about the French poem translation. Yes, I would appreciate the rough meaning of it - if you could post it under the translation and then send me the link, I'd appreciate it.

Yes, jp, I see what you mean, I've just re-read the explication note of the "meaning-only" option.
But I still don't understand what I am supposed to do as an expert, if I get an imperfect translation into my native language. How could I resist the temptation to correct it? This way what was meant to simplify things would become a further task for the experts. I don't think I could validate a translation with the wrong gender, or the wrong verb tense and person, or the wrong construction of the sentence, that should be too much for me. But, as the request is "meaning only" I can't ask perfection, so I would correct it. And, after doing so, I would have to give rating to the translator.....or to myself?

apple, for your last question, in any case (meaning only or not), you rate the translation before it's edited.
I understand it's not easy to accept an imperfect translation, but keep in mind that the "meaning only" translations might be removed in the future, so it's not worth spending too much effort on them. I will add a arning on accepted translations under the "meaning only" option to make it clear that the translation, even if it's accepted, might contain imperfections.

Anyway, "meaning only" translations can be rejected if they are not good enough. When translating a "meaning only" translation it's written this text : ' "Meaning only" translations are more focused on the meaning than on the form or the grammar. However, even though you don't need to be a fluent speaker of language "Target language", you must have a very good knowledge of both languages (Target language and Source language) to do this translation. '

Am I right that experts cannot see whether translations are "meaning only" when they are evaluating in list view? This seems to defeat the purpose!

Yes you can see it on the right column (the one dusplaying the source text). If you can't see it, let me know, it's a bug.

Sorry - you're right - I see it now. By the way, if a translation is "meaning only", and the English isn't perfect, I don't give it a 10 even though I accept it - I rate it the same way I would if it were not "meaning only" - I just don't edit it (except for a few cases where I didn't see that the requests were "meaning only".

Hello all, I know that it has nothing to do with meaning only and so, but I just wanted say a thing: the GREAT suggestion "English can be used as a transition language. The transl..." is not "readed" by submitters...

Not by the Greeks at least! I have lost count of the times I've asked for a transitional translation into English (and most of the times French).

By the way, is there ANY way that, when I ask for such a translation and the original has notes I also want translated, the notes can be included? I mean it's only once or twice that someone has noted that it is another person who requests these translations and has included the translation of the notes.

I did try to include them in the text for translation once but I got people asking me what the whole thing meant since the notes didn't exactly fit in.

And maybe I should have opened a new thread?

Kafetzou, yes you're right, the rating is the same for a meaning only translation, you can accept it with a very bad rating.

nava91, yes you are right, many don't read it. Maybe I should highlight this sentence when the source text is very rare. It's in my todolist now.

By the way I've given some points to Francky to ask for those english translations. I can do the same for you irini.

What you ask, irini, is ot possible. The only way I see is adding the notes on the original text, something like "please translate this note in english in the comments field".

Ah ok, it's here that you wanted to lead me? I thought you had something for me to print it...
your last sentence above, about the lack of access to technology, doesn't apply to the submiter to whom I sent a link a few days ago, and she used cyrillic alphabet to translate, so, by the way I think it was maybe because she was in a hurry, as it takes just a little bit longer in time to type in the frame at the link then copy-paste it here...I do agree with you about people who suffer from the lack of technology, but not about people who could use an easy link and didn't...

CLAVIER BULGARE

We're not talking about translations, Francky - we're talking about originals, although I agree in this case, since the requester is Bulgarian, she probably could have written it in Cyrillic.

But we should not assume that just because a person has access to the internet, they have a computer sophisticated enough to run unicode. I have many friends who still cannot read or write Greek in e-mail for that reason.

And how do you know she wasn't posting her request from an internet cafe or something? I wouldn't automatically assume it was from her home computer.

I was meaning that if she could use cyrillic to translate,it means she could use it as well to post an original. And I was talking about original and not about translation. And to go to a link, and use the keyboard provided by it, there's no need to have a computer running unicode, as it is an online typing, using the one running on the site. The link I provided being on cucumis, the keyboard's available everywhere, on any computer, even from a cybercafé.
I often provide links to users; after, they do what they want. As I said yesterday, as it is a meaning only request I've got nothing more to add about this topic, because this text will not stay for a long time on the site...

Oh very interesting, Francky - I didn't realize the keyboard was online - I though it was a downloadable one - in that case you're definitely right, except for cases of the types mentioned by Maski at
14 April 2007 16:54 above.

I also didn't notice that the requester of this Bulgarian translation had already translated in Cyrillic, so I apologize for my comments. You're definitely right in this case.

P.S. I sent the link for the online keyboard to myself at work - I can use that!

I found all sorts of online keyboard, Lexilogos provides most of them and it's totally free. You know how attached I am to diacritics,and once I typed "turkish keyboard" in the google search, then found the Lexilogos site, with these very easy to use keyboards. I've got one virtual keyboard for Hebrew too, slightly different, but still easy to use. I couldn't find ALL the different forms of writen languages for free, but a good part of them, the most commonly used at least.

Greek keyboard
Russian keyboard
Armenian keyboard
Georgian keyboard
Turkish keyboard
Hebrew virtual keyboard
Arabic keyboard
Chinese keyboard
Japanese Hiragana keyboard
Japanese katakana keyboard
Devanagari/Hindi keyboard
Thai keyboard
Korean keyboard

And there are a lot of others available, by just typing "*****"keyboard (what you're looking for) on the google search barr