KemyLand wrote:
Do you notice when newcommers in this forum (i really suspect they're mostly Asians) either use the syntatical order of their native language to speak English or use Google's Mistranslator?
Isn't that obvious? If you don't know the language, you don't know the language.
But you do know your mother tongue. So, unless you question each and every construct to see whether it's valid and proper in the target language and carries the intended meaning, you're gonna carry over bits of your native language (unless, of course, you start doing things at random, which is unlikely to improve chances of getting it right).
KemyLand wrote:
I've seen it takes about 3-5 posts from the first one to the real objective to be understood.
I had this very problem in 1998 or so. In the end what helped was:
- reading lots of English and deconstructing and analyzing the structure to understand what can be understood
- copying/imitating/borrowing words, phrases, grammar, etc from native speakers
- writing lots of posts to make things stick in my mind
KemyLand wrote:
Anyway, not even native speakers are perfect translators. You can even see some Spanish syntatic sugar on this same paragraph
!
What's worse, many can't escribir in their native idiomas or don't have a feeling of what's bueno and what's malo.
I happen to be working on an English to Russian translation of a book and some of the translations I got to proofread/correct/etc (it's a large collaborative project with many people doing their individual and relatively small parts) were extremely poor. I must also say that the original author was quite lax detail-wise and language-wise and would benefit from another round of proofreading and correction as well.
So, I end up correcting and extending both the original and the translation.