2015考研必讀雜志《經濟學人》節(jié)選

　　Minority languages

　　小眾語言

　　Cookies, caches and cows

　　終端數(shù)據(jù)，緩存，奶牛

　　Translating technological terms throws up some peculiar challenges

　　科學術語翻譯中的難題

　　Speaking the customer's language

　　讓手機語言本土化

　　OUSMANE sweats under a tin roof as he thumbs through a Chinese smartphone that he is selling at the technology market in Bamako, Mali. Words in French, Mali's official language, scroll down the screen. “A ka nyi?” (Is it good?) a customer asks him in Bambara, Mali's most widely used tongue.

　　巴馬科馬里的科技市場里，熾熱的錫皮屋檐下的奧斯曼手中拿著銷售的中國制造的智能手機。馬里的官方語言是法語，手機屏幕上也是滿滿的法文。一個顧客用馬里大部分人使用的曼丁哥語問“手機怎么樣?”

　　Mozilla, the foundation behind Firefox, an open-source web browser, wants Ousmane's customers to have the option of a device that speaks their language. Smartphones with its operating system (OS) are already on sale in 24 countries, including Bangladesh, India and Mexico, for as little as 33. Other countries will be added as it makes more deals with handset manufacturers. And Bambara is one of dozens of languages into which volunteer “l(fā)ocalisers” are translating the OS.

　　火狐(開源網絡瀏覽器)制造商謀智公司致力于讓奧斯曼的顧客中的手機顯示本土語言?，F(xiàn)在已經有24 個國家在銷售該公司開發(fā)的操作系統(tǒng)，包括孟加拉國，印度，墨西哥。與更多手機制造商達成協(xié)議后，更多國家會銷售其操作系統(tǒng)。致力于“本土化”的志愿者正在把該系統(tǒng)翻譯成各種語言，曼丁哥語也在其中。

　　Mozilla has 230 localisation teams, says Jeff Beatty, who co-ordinates some from his office in Utah. Their work takes both time and ingenuity. Firefox for a computer uses about 40,000 words;for the phone OS, 16,000. Translators must express technological terms in languages shaped by livestock, farming and fishing, and choose alternatives for culture-specific words such as“cookie”, “file” and “mouse”.

　　Jeff Beatty 說謀智公司在各地有230 個隊伍。他們與猶他州的辦公室的一些人員進行協(xié)作。這項工作既消耗時間又耗腦力。電腦版的火狐瀏覽器包含四萬用詞;手機客戶端包含一萬六千詞。翻譯人員需要表達農林業(yè)，畜牧業(yè)，捕魚業(yè)產出的技術詞匯。并且在遇到具體文化相關用詞如“密碼緩存”，“文件”和“鼠標”選擇同義詞。

　　Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying);“timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral,a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven. In Malawi's Chichewa language, which has 10m speakers, “cached pages” became mfutso wa tsamba, or bits of leftover food. The windowless houses of the 440,000 speakers of Zapotec, a family of indigenous languages in Mexico, meant that computer “windows” became “eyes”.

　　Ibrahima Sarr，塞內加爾程序員，領導火狐富拉語翻譯項目。從塞內加爾到尼日利亞，有2千萬人使用富拉語。翻譯中，“碰撞”變成了“絆倒的牛，但是沒有死”。“超時”變成“你的魚逃走了”。“長寬比”是指因為織錯了捕魚網而受到的老人的責備。馬維拉共和國的齊切瓦語，有1000 萬人使用。其中“緩存頁面”翻譯成了“剩余的少量食物”。墨西哥本土語種巴薩特克語有44 萬人使用，由于他們的房屋沒有窗戶，因此電腦“界面”譯成了“眼睛”。