Question:
Has anybody here tried something from a software company called
"Transparent Language"? I tried several of their software and the
experience was mixed. I think the most annoying thing was that they
did not provide the original scripts for languages such as Arabic,
Chinese and Japanese. I do not understand this. Is it so difficult
to make the software Unicode-compatible? Another thing that pissed me
off is that they did not provide any information about phonology and
the related orthography. They may think it is better to challenge the
users to figure those out by deciphering their sometimes crappy
romanization. I am a native speaker of Chinese and found that the
Mandarin part of their "101 Languages of the World" was horrible. The
intonation was unnatural and it was not because the speakers slowed
down to make pedagogical articulation. I seriously doubt if they were
native Mandarin speakers because they did mispronounce! There were
also numerous mistakes in their pinyin transcription. Maybe they
thought Mandarin was one of those languages whose native speakers are
difficult to come by? But I think their Spanish, French and German
programs are good, though, as far as I can tell.
Answer:
Then it sucks.
A few years back, I read a "teach yourself" type book for Arabic. The
authors tried to convince the reader to learn the Arabic script
directly, rather than using a translation at the beginning. The
rationale is that learning a translation first and later switching to
the real script will turn out to waste more time and energy than
beginning directly with the real script.
matin> Is it so difficult to make the software Unicode-compatible?
It doesn't have to be Unicode-compatible just to display Arabic,
Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc. Before the existence of Unicode,
there were already software systems that allows a US-made computer to
display (and let the user type in) Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic,
etc.
Haha.. That reminds of watching Jacky Chan's films on TV here in
Germany. Without exceptions, they always show it dubbed in German.
O.K. I can improve my German. But when it comes to scenes where the
Chinese actors were talking in Cantonese, they wanted to keep it in
Cantonese. So, the dubbers tried to immitate the original Cantonese
pronunciations. They did such a bad job that I, a native speaker,
couldn't understand!!! I had to guess from context. And then, after
the guessing, I tried to map the meaning to Cantonese expressions, and
eventually figured out what the dubbers were trying to immitate.
That's so terrible.
Recently, on a DVD, a similar thing was observed. The English sound
track contained a short conversation in Taiwanese (Minnan). Guess
what!? The German sound track used Mandarin for that part. Although
the Taiwanese on the English sound track were not perfect (I don't
know much Taiwanese to comment, though), the Mandarin on the German
sound track was again terrible -- the tones are all wrong and the
dubbers were using German stress rules. Fortunately, the DVD as
subtitles in a dozen languages, and I can read what they meant.
Haha... with the largest number of speakers in the world? Then, you
have to challenge how much the authors and editors know about
languages. From your comments, I would give this product a discredit.
matin> But I think their Spanish, French and German programs are
matin> good, though, as far as I can tell.
O.K. Then, just a Eurocentric product.
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