On Tue, 19 Mar 2024 19:53:46 +0000, Timothy Collinson wrote:

>Oh dear... that doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

Trust me... it wasn't. Most of the frust was in trying to figure out _why_
every attempt to paste Chinese was resulting in either question marks or
the funny diamond shape with a question mark inside that indicates "Huh?
What's this?". And yet when I wanted to paste the exact same data into
Word, or even into Notepad, it worked just fine...

>Does anyone read enough Chinese to be able to id an author for the
>bibliography?  Or do you know Jeff and are allowed to say?
>Date of publication would be handy too - I think it's in the corner but it
>would be nice to be sure.

I do have the gentleman's name (in Chinese characters, and I believe in
Roman transliteration), but he indicated that he would prefer credit to
match his 'handle' on the blog to which he posted the translations. He
gives the translation of the Chinese characters for that handle as "Gentle
Coward" in his email return address, and "Survived Coward" in the body of
the email responding to my request for his name in the Chinese characters,
and the link on the blog seems to ident as "raving coward", though putting
the two characters through Google Translate comes back as just "coward".

(I emphasize that these are in _traditional_ orthography, as used in the
Republic of China, not the simplified orthography mandated for the People's
Republic of China. If you learned how to read "mainland Chinese" as opposed
to "Taiwan Chinese", there will be characters that you won't recognize.)

A reminder: Mr Collinson's article, in translation, is at
https://home.gamer.com.tw/artwork.php?sn=5854961 and mine, in translation,
is at https://home.gamer.com.tw/artwork.php?sn=5854378

An interesting tidbit: In the Chinese description of the Beowulf, the
character that translates as "ton" in describing the cargo capacity does in
fact come up as a _volume_ ton (although the dictionary associated with
Google Translate gives the value of the ton as 100 cubic feet, rather than
the 14.5 cubic meters of Classic Traveller or the 500 cubic feet of the US
edition of GURPS Traveller), not a _mass_ ton.

It is because of nuances like that that when translating from an unfamiliar
language to a familiar one, even using Google or Bing, you want to be
conversant with the subject matter. If your language uses different words
for "ton-volume" vs "ton-mass", you need to know that the Beowulf-class
Free Trader starship is built on a 200 "ton-volume" hull, but the Beowulf
railroad locomotive may well be built on a 200 "ton-mass" chassis. This is
why _I_ do not translate articles _from_ English _to_ anything else - it's
almost guaranteed that I'd miss those nuances in any language other than
English.

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