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Subject:Re: translation: SDLX Elite, Farsi, and Dari From:"Tom Brophy" <tombrophy -at- ireland -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Fri, 04 Aug 2006 13:24:51 +0000
Hi work, :-)
> We are considering a translation company that says they can use SDLX
> Elite to partly automate the translation of docs from English to Dari.
> They say that, while SDLX Elite does not list Dari in its list of
> supported languages, it does support Farsi, which they say shares a
> character set with Dari.
> Therefore, they say Dari text can created and managed in SDLX Elite,
> and the only shortcoming is that the spell-checker will not work
> because its dictionary is in Farsi.
The Dari language is a member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian family of languages; it is, along with Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. Dari is the Afghan dialect of Farsi (Persian). It is written in a modified Arabic alphabet, and it has many Arabic and Persian loanwords. The syntax of Dari does not differ greatly from Farsi, but the stress accent is less prominent in Dari than in Farsi. To mark attribution, Dari uses the suffix -ra. The vowel system of Dari differs from that of Farsi, and Dari also has additional consonants.
About one-third of the population of Afghanistan, i.e., about 5,000,000 people (Tadzhik, Uzbak, Turkman, Hazarah, Some Pashtoon), speak Dari. It is the primary language of the Tadzhik, Hazara, and Chahar Aimak peoples. Dari, rather than Pashto, serves as the means of communication between speakers of different languages in Afghanistan.
There is no explicit support for Dari in Windows XP, so you are dependent on the level of support provided for Farsi.
> I cannot tell if this company is in the know or not. Not one other
> company has suggested this usage of a translation software package.
SDLX is a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) package. You will get optimum benefit from its use if you have existing material which has been translated in Farsi. In this scenario, you/your agency will align the English and Dari texts such that SDLX has a translation memory (TM) which contains a corresponding translation for each English text segment. When you process subsequent projects against this TM, it will replace instances of any text segments for which it has a corresponding translation with that translated text.
If you expect you will have subsequent versions of the docs, use SDLX (or some other CAT tool). If you don't expect subsequent versions, then the decision to use CAT or not comes down to the overhead of setting up versus the benefit of reduced translations (due to duplicate segments and or fuzzy matched segments).
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