RE: Need your opinions re: Simplified English

["CB Casper" <knowone -at- surfy -dot- net>]

On a recent episode of a variant of Star Trek, the
translator had to toss the UT and go face to face
with the alien to get the point across.  The UT 
didn't have enough examples of this new language
to make an accurate translation. The good guys won.


On another tact, I went to a vendor to diagnose a
problem with stainless steel becoming rusty. The
native english speaker didn't understand the meaning
of the word 'subsequently' in the context of the
sequence of cleaning the part in one solution, then
protecting it by dipping it in another. 

The part was contaminated due to being processed 
in reverse sequence. Use of simplified wording would 
have prevented this problem. Another case for the 
justification of a TW, since he was reading directly 
from the MIL-SPEC, not a document that had any meaning
for the average user.  'before' or 'after' has so
much more direct meaning than subsequent.

"omit unnecessary words"
"omit words"
"omit" is adequate when talking about words!

CB

langwytche -at- yahoo -dot- com wrote: 
> 
> The solution to the language problem is decidedly easy, 
> and I'm surprised no one has suggested it yet: the 
> universal translator.
> 
> What, no other Star Trek fans on the list?   :)

>> Natural language translation is still a quite hideously 
>> difficult computational problem . . .
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