[NCUC-DISCUSS] RE : Re: NCUC French translation project [was Chinese Translation Project]
Nicolas Adam
nickolas.adam at gmail.com
Wed Mar 18 13:05:29 CET 2015
Vendu!!
;)
Please excuse my mobile brevity
-------- Message d'origine --------
De : Timothe Litt <litt at acm.org>
Date : 2015/03/18 7:52 AM (GMT-05:00)
À : ncuc-discuss at lists.ncuc.org
Objet : Re: [NCUC-DISCUSS] NCUC French translation project [was Chinese Translation Project]
I won't get far into the French argument: I'm no expert. But to Nicolas' point on the English equivalent, which illuminates a larger issue:
This is a common issue with jargon. To decide, consider your audience.
The way to understand how this diverges is to expand the acronym. Here's a sentence from the home page:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit organization.
If one removes the article, it makes no sense.
On the other hand:
IBM is a for-profit organization.
Here, the acronym has been turned into a noun by years of common usage.
"International Business Machines" is a for-profit organization.
barely works, because it's implictly
International Business Machines Incorporated is a for-profit organization.
So the issue is whether ICANN is a well-known enough acronym to be considered a noun, rather than something that people need to expand in-place to understand.
In an introductory document, on behalf of the audience, I say no. In any language.
Within the group of people who live and breathe ICANN policy and politics, the answer can be different. The ICANN sure is a complex replacement for one guy and his secretary.
And that's the larger challenge for writing any document: know your audience.
Donc, je suis d'accord avec Jean. Troisième.
Timothe Litt
ACM Distinguished Engineer
--------------------------
This communication may not represent the ACM or my employer's views,
if any, on the matters discussed.
On 18-Mar-15 03:41, Jean Guillon wrote:
Troisième.
Jean Guillon
www.gTLD.club
Mobile: +33.631109837
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:06 PM, Nicolas Adam <nickolas.adam at gmail.com> wrote:
This is a more complex question than meets the eyes ;)
There is probably 3 ways to go about it.
À propos de ICANN
À propos d'ICANN
À propos de l'ICANN
and I guess the last one is the one I liked the least. But I'm more than willing to go with it though.
It is true that we commonly say l'ONU, and that we have used the l' most everywhere else when it comes to International orgs. However, it's sometimes wrong. And more often than we might think.
L'élision consiste, en règle générale, à remplacer par une apostrophe une des voyelles finales "a, e, i" d'un mot, lorsqu'il ce mot est suivi d'un autre commençant par une voyelle "a, e, i, o, u" ou commençant par un " h " muet.
However, we do not think about ICANN (at least I don't) as "La ICANN" or "Le ICANN" that we could strip that a or that e and replace it with an *'*.
For me, it's more of a "de ICANN" situation, as in "le problème de ICANN est que bla bla" and not "le problème de la ICANN ..." (where you would have two déterminants in front of the word) and that's why I abbreviated it like I did, using the above rule. In essence, I determined that the sentenced to be shortened by the élision was
1) À propos de ICANN
and not
2) À propos de la ICANN
So that was one grammatical reason. But a grammatical reason that hinges fully on the first determination being right (a determination that could be challenged: it *is* possible to have "de la" in front of a word: "de la tarte"). So the determination itself seems to hinge on what is the most appropriate word category for ICANN. Is it like a pie or more like Internet? Notice, not the Internet.
So the reason ceases to be solely grammatical and becomes logical and relates to a category mistake that is often made with many process or phenomenon that are (wrongly, IMO) thing-ified (reified).
I may have been too polluted by English (please take no offense, I love Poe's idiom), but for the same reason I do not feel it right to say "The ICANN is ..." and that it sounds better to say "ICANN is", for instance; and for the same reason that it sounds better to say "UNICEF is" rather than "The UNICEF is ...", I feel it it is ugly form on top of bad philosophy to emphasize a reified (thing-ified) outcome, for some words referring to processes and phenomena.
Yes, English uses "The UN ..." quite a bit when it comes to the United Nations. I have no idea why and I'll grant that it almost feels wrong today to say "UN is ...". I feel this form ("... the UN ...") is a wrong that will endure because it has, basically. But at the same time it doesn't look like we are going there with (the) ICANN or (the) UNICEF ...
I think that logically, it is a category mistake, the same that many people make when they say "*the* Internet" (or, its French equivalent, "l'Internet"). Internet is not a thing, and language shouldn't thing-ified it. Internet is a process, an emerging phenomenon. So is ICANN!
So ... the fact that ICANN's first letter means, precisely, Internet, the same word people so often wrongly use a "the" in front of, kinds of stack on that first determination on which the grammatical rules is then applied.
When we use the "ONU" acronym, it is the translation of the UN acronym, and it stands for "Organisation des Nations Unies". The word "Organisation" calls for the l' in a way that seems impossible to resist, but I would argue that sometimes, it is indeed wrong to think
"la mission de la ONU"
and that we should have probably thought
"la mission de ONU"
and that, as a result, we should have probably said "la mission d'ONU" instead of "la mission de l'ONU".
But I am well aware that I will not find that "correct" élision anywhere and that usage has deeply ingrained "de l'ONU".
I wouldn't make a case for ceasing to use l'ONU, you know. But I would resist (as I have in the past) any attempt by proofreaders to make me change ICANN into l'ICANN in a personal text of mine. This not being a personal text of mine, I will go with whatever you think is best. I guess I felt like I would preemptively right a soon to be aesthetical wrong :) and you caught me red handed in language activism ;)
Cheers
Nicolas
On 17/03/2015 9:56 AM, Mathias HOUNGBO wrote:
Hello Nicolas
why you write "À propos d'ICANN" and not "À propos de l'ICANN" ?
we said "À propos de l'ONU" here http://www.un.org/fr/aboutun/
Thanks
"And then God said Noah make me a backup I need to format"
"Mefies toi de la médiocrité, c'est la moisissure de l'esprit"
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Le 13/03/2015 20:05, Nicolas Adam a écrit :
Here is the first half, which is the most i could do today.
I send it right now because I won't be able to work more on it before Monday night, so if someone else wanted to do some work on it then they can do so without redoing what I just did. Since there is quite a bit of neologism that has arisen around Internet Governance, and translating them with equivalents (with the view that they stay stable) isn't always a straightforward process, don't hesitate to discuss the choices I made with me.
Cheers!
Nicolas
On 13/03/2015 11:34 AM, Stephanie Perrin wrote:
Huguenot... we bailed out for England so long ago we are rusty! I must admit it was embarrassing when I lived in Quebec, where folks are not taught much history of those massacres, and did not understand the explanation. You, on the other hand, have such an english name....?
Suppose we take the text in word and divide it up? I have plunked the online version into word, attached.
cheers Stephanie
PS some of these expressions must have already been translated, anybody know which document would be easiest to follow? I dont fancy dredging through meeting transcripts if I can avoid it...
On 2015-03-13 10:57, Nicolas Adam wrote:
Ma langue maternelle est le français. I can help with the vetting and writing. You have french names Stéphanie Pérrin ;)
Nicolas
On 13/03/2015 10:29 AM, Stephanie Perrin wrote:
Yes we do, I am not a native speaker but can do a rough translation which we could have vetted by a francophone.
Stephanie Perrin
On 2015-03-13 4:04, Arsène Tungali wrote:
This is a great news.
We may need to think of French translation as well. Do we have french
speakers in the NCUC?
2015-03-13 6:44 UTC+02:00, Jia He <hejia925 at gmail.com>:
Dear All,
Yes, this idea is great. I have a face-to-face conversation with Peter
this morning . For the brochure translation, we can divide the task into
two parts. each of our both can translate a half , then we invite the
experts in CCTEAG (Chinese Community Translation Expert Advisory Group) to
Check it. CCTEAG is organized by my academy, so it is easy to connect with
those experienced experts who participate in ICANN meeting for many times.
Meanwhile, those experts can make sure the words we translated is in the
right way.
We will see the Chinese NCUC brochure in Argentina.
Regards,
Jia
2015-03-13 0:17 GMT+08:00 Amr Elsadr <aelsadr at egyptig.org>:
Peter,
This sounds fantastic. Exactly the sort of work a regional representative
on the EC should be undertaking!! The best of luck to you and Jia on your
endeavour.
Thanks.
Amr
On Mar 12, 2015, at 4:37 PM, PeterGreen <seekcommunications at hotmail.com>
wrote:
Hello NCUCers,
As the Asian/Pacific Representative on the Executive Committee, I would
like to take this opportunity to formally announce that we are launching a
"*NCUC
Chinese Translation Project*".
In this Project, we will translate NCUC materials into Chinese, enabling
more Chinese to be involved in our Constituency, to that extent to
commit
to the most diversified Constituency within ICANN community in terms of
language.
This Project will be taken by a translation team under the Department of
International Affairs and Policy Analysis of China Organizational Name
Administration Center (CONAC) - my home institution, together with my
Chinese Colleague Jia He who recently joined NCUC.
Firstly, we will start by translating NCUC Brochure, which is currently
written in Enligh and Spanish, available at
http://www.ncuc.org/brochure/
.
After that we will tranlate other materials into Chinese according to an
EC scheduled priorities list (which is to be determined).
It is aimed that we could circulate Chinese vesion NCUC Brochures during
ICANN 53 to be held in Buenos Aires in late June.
In launching this thread, hope more NCUCers who would like to join in
other kind of language tranlation work take up a similar initiative.
Thanks very much for your attention.
Best Regards
Zhang Zuan / Peter Green
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