Post
Topic
Board Reputation
Re: The shameful Romanian translation of Bitcoin white paper from Bitcoin.org
by
GazetaBitcoin
on 03/11/2020, 10:16:13 UTC
Same with the Bengali translation. Recently I have read the Bengali version a few pages and found the translation is a total shit. The way sentences were presented was looking like automated translation or translation from people who have very little idea about bitcoin.
I have planned to translate the white paper and submit it again. I think you should do the same, forget everything else.

Great finding, Little Mouse! Good luck with this translation. I'll do the same.

Based on my prior experience of working with you on your volunteer translations of Bitcoin advocacy essays (plus my political manifesto!), I have confidence in your own work.

Thank you for the kind words, nullius! Indeed, I put lots of efforts for each translation I make, this is why it takes me way more hours compared to other translator, but I'm a very methodical and meticulous person and I always want to ensure that the final product is in an exceptional shape from any point of view, including that I make sure the translations are also idiomatic and they contain all Romanian diacritics. And this takes time. Not many translators spend their time to write also with diacritics (ă, â, Î, î, Ș, ș, Ț, ț) and they use simple characters instead (a, i, S, s, T, t). Besides, an idiomatic translation requires to really put your brain at work in order to come up with expressions from the respective language. Oh well, GDB's translation is not idiomatic at all.

And if you were to create a translation, you could create a PR (Pull Request).

I should elaborate [...]

Thank you for all the thorough guidelines, nullius. I also read your forked topic. I wish I could merit you, but the forum doesn't allow me as I already sent you 50 merits in the last 30 days... I'll start with the translation first and when the time will come I'll reach to you in case I won't understand exactly every detail.

An independent translation would probably be less effort than trying to fix somebody else’s mess; and why should an incompetent translator retain byline credit for the result of painstaking line-by-line corrections?

Yes, I came to this conclusion as well, also taking into consideration that you and other members suggested the same. I'll present below a corrected version of actual translation which contains the Abstract, Introduction and Transactions parts, as I managed to correct these meanwhile. However, what you'll see below represents just a correction for the actual translation and not the way I would translate these parts. Basically I corrected the text written incorrectly, the alignment issues, typos and the words which made no sense. But I do not agree at all with this translation, be it corrected by me or by someone else. And that's because (1) each translator uses his own style for translating a text (the words can be translated with various other words, depending on translator's consideration for which "sound" better) and also because (2) this translation is not idiomatic. It looks like it was made because it has to be made. It does not express Satoshi's thoughts; the reader does not feel the same as he would feel when reading Satoshi's document. But again: actual translation wasn't made by someone knowing what s/he's doing: it was made by someone which is an illiterate and which doesn't understand anything from computers field, at general, nor from Bitcoin, in particular.

Github is not very friendly for newbie, so take your time GazetaBitcoin. Follow nullius advices.

Yes, I'll proceed as advised, bitmover. Thank you for the suggestion!


Thank you for correcting the link, NeuroticFish! But first things first Smiley I'll let you all know when I'll finish the translation made from scratch. Meanwhile, I kindly ask you to confirm / deny if (1) the corrected text below is err.... correct Smiley ; (2) the text from the middle of the pictures sounds absurd in Romanian (in part) and looks like it was written by andulolika or even worst someone who used his / her feet instead of brain. I know you already confirmed for the first selection I presented above, but I also kindly ask you to confirm for this selection as well. Prior getting to the decision to not finish correcting the entire text I correct a part of it and I'd like everybody to know that what I'm stating is true.





Ok, here we go. So I continued to correct the actual translation for a bit and I made again some screenshots, presenting the corrected text (at the left), the actual text (in the middle) and Satoshi's text (at the right). I also added Satoshi's document in order to show that the actual translation, except that it is shameful, it doesn't even respect the formatting of the text used by Satoshi (including, but not limited to: spaces between rows; the "Abstract" section indent; the missing page numbers; the incorrect alignment of the text (centered vs. justified) etc.). I didn't count anymore how many mistakes I found so far, but they are hundreds. The pictures are not truncated with height=400, for better visibility over the text.

If anyone still doubts or has questions, please let me know.











I will let you all know once I finish a new translation for this very precious document which, sadly, was humiliated by Nea Sandu and goanadupabitcoin.