Talk:Thoughts on Multilingualism

This issue should be seen in the context of translating from L1 (say English) into L2. From a translator's point of view about ninety percent of the words that are in use to identify various objects, persons, ideas, etc. around us are names or they behave like names. Of all the texts that are heard and/or read at least fifty percent behave like names (call them quasi-names), because they are either in fact names of items that usually belong to a nomenclature (classification scheme), or are titles, labels or headings of various objects, products, etc., including texts, sections, paragraphs, etc. Now, such quasi-names are usualy word clusters, such as idioms, collocations, etc. and most of these word clusters are not to be translated word by word, but as a whole, and if there is no corresponding phrase available in l2, they need to be created, alas, not by concocting the relevant constituent words in L2. On the net there are about a hundred different nomenclature sites available in English that as such should not be copyright, especially when you sort them into alphabetic order. Now for a major breakthrough in the improvement of efficieny/prolifiency of translating from L1 into L2, these nomenclatures should be first translated and/or recreated in L2. Mind you, the problem of translating quasi-names is sometimes solved by preparing charts that show the mutation of names, or aliases as opposed to word-by-word translations, and as a result, you will have to be able to search for multiple words, longer strings, etc. as opposed to the current single word searches over wikipedia or on the Internet for that matter. Another problem is that there should be a way for restoring the results of decontextualisation (i.e to practise contextualisation), the reverse process of disambiguation. What do you think?

firk 18:44, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) firk@axelero.hu

Bilingualism

I think it is very correct to indicate between brackets names and quasi-names in original language: we are becoming and we should become more and more multilingual.
However, I think we should also indicate the names in the language which we are writing in.
In fact, many names and quasi-names are very popular in translation and we should also keep these words in use.
For instance, I think that in English we should say "Genoa" for "Genova".
On the other hand, there are names and quasi-manes no more known in translation.
However, I think they also should be kept in use when we are writing about the historical period in which they were commonly used.
For instance, we should keep to say "the treaty of Presburg", even if now Presburg is usually refered to as Bratislava.
So, I propose a multilingualism not only in the geographical sense (meaning that we put the name in many current languages), but also in a more historical sense (indicating the names used in the same language, but in different periods). Lele giannoni 15:50, 16 September 2009 (UTC)