Nice meditation, ++

It would be interesting to see how many reserved words of a language could be translated to an exact counterpart in another language. The problem with English is that it can be too descriptive - there are very few terms that can't be described with a single word, and if those there are, we generally nick a word from another language.

A recent article in New Scientist discussed this issue, and found that bi-lingual people who were given a description of a photograph in English, built up a mental image of a moving scene, whilst the same description translated into Spanish generally produced a static mental image.

They were trying to show that people can actually think differently when they think in a given language.

As for my own experience - I had to translate a system from one flavour of COBOL to another when the comments/variables were all written in Dutch. It's only then that you realise how descriptive even short data names can be.

'I think the problem lies in the fact that your data doesn't fit my program'.

In reply to Re: Polyglot Challenges by awkmonk
in thread Polyglot Challenges by Petras

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