Frank W
11-09-2005, 2:04 PM
Looking at my site stats recently, I found that a Brazilian visitor had picked up a Portuguese translation of one page.
It was one of the composite pages with Surnames, ED descriptions, and Street/Place names so I was curious as to how it had turned out.
The ED descriptions and Street/Place names were a little quaint, but could mostly be understood from a Portuguese-English dictionary. What was more striking was that some Surnames were also translated into Portuguese words, so the reverse translation might well fail.
It adds a new variety of error for those who may be searching foreign sources and using translated versions, so the moral seems to be that you should always look at the native language versions where surnames are concerned. (assuming that the foreign language used appears in recognisable European characters)
Wonder if the off-shore indexers sometimes work from translated sources?
Regards..............Frank W
It was one of the composite pages with Surnames, ED descriptions, and Street/Place names so I was curious as to how it had turned out.
The ED descriptions and Street/Place names were a little quaint, but could mostly be understood from a Portuguese-English dictionary. What was more striking was that some Surnames were also translated into Portuguese words, so the reverse translation might well fail.
It adds a new variety of error for those who may be searching foreign sources and using translated versions, so the moral seems to be that you should always look at the native language versions where surnames are concerned. (assuming that the foreign language used appears in recognisable European characters)
Wonder if the off-shore indexers sometimes work from translated sources?
Regards..............Frank W