On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 03:07:43AM +0100, Michael Heerdegen wrote: > Drew Adams writes: > > > And trying to learn a language by translating > > as you go is hard, and not necessarily helpful. > > I don't know if I would do anyone a favor when I would try to translate > every Emacs specific term (and there are a lot) literally [...] I think we aren't aware how full of strange buried metaphors our languages are... until we try. Some travel well, some less so, depending on the source and target languages. "May contain nuts or parts of nuts" as an allergy warning on a candy package I bought once was translated into Spanish by disambiguating the nut into the bolt-and-nut side of things. OTOH, "crane" as a lifting device, which is obviously a metaphor based on the bird's look with its long beak does travel surprisingly well whithin Western European languages. Up to the historians to explain why (my hunch is that craftspeople travelled across Western Europe at the time this device found widespread use, but I'm not a historian). "Literal" translation (the term becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the closer you get) is bound to get tangled in that mess. Cheers -- t