November 24, 2003

Cool But Bizarre

I got two copies of Perl 6 Essentials in the mail from O'Reilly today. In Polish. Which is really cool, albeit terribly bizarre. ('Specially as I don't speak or read any polish) It does drive home issues with internationalization and mixed-language character handling, though. (I see how Unicode is useful with this in ways that dealing with Asian character sets doesn't show nearly so much)

I should dig out the digital camera and put up a snapshot of the cover just for kicks. Well, that and the ego stroke, of course :)

Posted by Dan at November 24, 2003 02:14 PM | TrackBack (0)
Comments

The same Polish publisher also translated the Extreme Programming Pocket Guide. I wonder how the puns fared.

Posted by: chromatic at November 24, 2003 07:13 PM

I can top that, in Polish too. When my book started going into foreign translations I started getting copies in Chinese, Italian, etc.. One fine day, this showed up.

I don't know where to begin to tell you what's wrong with that picture. I'll start with "I've never used CorelDraw" and let it go from there.

Posted by: Clinton at November 24, 2003 07:31 PM

Somehow I doubt that "CorelDraw" is polish for Perl. :)

I did notice that whoever translated the thing translated some of the names in the examples--Allison used Hitchhiker's Guide characters in some of them and the names had been changed, presumably to whatever they were in the Polish translations.

I was surprised that whoever did it left the spelling of my last name alone. I half-expected to see that it'd been properly transliterated into Polish. It's remotely possible that it already is, and I don't speak or read Polish so I wouldn't know, but from seeing the character distribution in the book I'm assuming at least one accent, dangly bit, or slash was in order somewhere.

Ah, well, no mind. Now, it'll be interesting to see how things go if this ever gets a Japanese (or Chinese, or Korean) translation... :)

Posted by: Dan at November 25, 2003 10:40 AM