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German and english translations of service manuals

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Christian Christensen
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Stockholm
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Christian Christensen Posted: Sat, Jul 19 2014 12:53 AM

After read all the procedures in the BC1200 service manual with my not-so.good german and quite good english, I have in several sections  started to think that the english text in the service manuals are actually  translated from german to english.....

not from danish to english and danish to german, which would be nativly logical.

The english descritptions in the serivce manual are in some parts actually not as descriptive as the german text, in some part the english descriptions actually stupid put. compared as in german,

I wonder why.

This has made me to start reading the german part all the time now.

Anyone else with this experience..... ? 

My re-capped M75 are my precious diamonds.

tournedos
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tournedos replied on Sat, Jul 19 2014 8:12 AM

When we are talking about the kit we now call vintage, the engineers that designed them might have been born in the '30s or even the '20s. Back in their days, German was a far more popular language in engineering that it is now, and they might have even been studying in Germany. Possibly they were just better in German than in English. Deeply technical documents aren't often translated by professional translators, because they wouldn't have a clue about the intent of the text.

At least here in Finland German was the first foreign language in most schools well into the '50s and even '60s.

My pet example was the specification for the remote control protocol of some pro VTR, can't remember the make. It was obviously written in English by a Japanese engineer and most of the time had just words put one after another in incomprehensible sentences. At least it had pictures of the command frames, but most of the time I just had to try everything because the text could not explain the simplest things unambiguosly.

--mika

Christian Christensen
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Stockholm
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Interesting and good answer.
Thanks Mika Smile 

My re-capped M75 are my precious diamonds.

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