Mar 20th, 2007
Why do we abandon linguists and natural languages?
1st published the 2nd of March, 2007.
The fact of knowing how to tweak your WP installation or how to customise PHP scripts doesn’t make you a PHP guru.
The fact of being a native speaker of one language and have some knowledge of another doesn’t make you a good translator.
Why then do we hire professional programmers but leave translations to amateurs?
I’m talking mainly about some Open Source projects. I do like collaborative projects, but I find it very sad that they do spend some money and put special care on the coding but not even half of it on the translation managing or at least its revision…
EDIT the 20th of March 2007: The most pathetic examples I’ve seen so far come from so-called “big projects” with money involved.
I’m not saying that this is always like that…
But almost…
Well, I guess that the good thing about Open Source is that I can always go and do it myself, but not all applications I use are Open Source, and in some of them it’s evident that the texts (in Spanish, at least) had never been read by a professional linguist before being released. As it can be seen on the image on the left.
More ramblings on this can be found here (in Spanish).
Hola, me llamo Cristina MJ, pero en este mundo paralelo me dicen 
Hello, my name is Cristina MJ, but I'm also known as 