Decouple the actions

Posted Aug 20, 2024 22:26 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Decouple the actions by Wol
Parent article: FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system

It's not just individual vocabulary words, either. Chinese grammar does many things that are utterly alien to Indo-European languages, like verb stacking, aspect markers in lieu of tenses, the use of classifiers and absence of determiners in noun phrases, and a near-total lack of inflection (the latter is, oddly enough, almost a feature of English, but English does a little inflection here and there, mostly for verb conjugation and plurals). That's not even getting into the fact that "Chinese" is not one language, it is a whole family of (closely-related) languages, which all do things slightly differently from each other.

(For the curious: I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar a helpful starting point, but I must admit that I don't know Chinese myself, so I have no idea how accurate it is.)

Decouple the actions

Posted Aug 21, 2024 0:21 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yup. This is correct. One thing that tripped many translation systems was the lack of grammar tenses in Chinese. In English, every verb has to have a tense, it's unavoidable. Not so in Chinese, you have to get the tense (past, present, future) from the surrounding context.

Another thing that especially trips documentation writers is passive voice. It's rarely used in Chinese, unless talking about something serious ("he was hit by a car" type serious). A sentence like "once a job is processed" is difficult to translate word-for-word.