From: Tex Texin (tex@i18nguy.com)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 13:29:35 EDT
John Cowan wrote:
> In the case of public codes, company code clerks became quite adept
> at reading the more frequent codes without reference to the code book.
> On one occasion, a code clerk got a cable from an agent located halfway
> around the planet reading simply AHXNO, a code entirely unfamiliar to him.
> Unfortunately, when he looked it up, he found the reading to be:
>
> Met with a fatal accident.
What's funny to me about this message, is a product message catalog I
was responsible for localizing had messages created by software
developers, such as (paraphrasing from memory):
The client is dead.
The client has been killed.
You killed the client.
Some of the translators were horrified. We had to explain that the
"client" was software used by the user, and that to "kill it"
meant the software was no longer operating, not that the product caused
the death of the user. And then we had to get the developers to change
the message, since even in english they were not the most effective
messages.
Lucky too, that support couldn't cause someone on the phone to give a
command that could kill the client...
-- ------------------------------------------------------------- Tex Texin cell: +1 781 789 1898 mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com Xen Master http://www.i18nGuy.com XenCraft http://www.XenCraft.com Making e-Business Work Around the World -------------------------------------------------------------
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