O.P. Translated website, Thai
I see you have added the Thai translation of the main site there. Well, I am a Thai here and I found the language used in the main site very weird, coloquial, and not natural...
Even though the old Thai website had commas, which are actually never used in Thai at all, it was still fine and all. However, the new one is not... >.> First thing is preposition, many places lack prepositions, and some places even use prepositions inappropriately. Also, many places have spaces where it does not belong, making it a bit hard to understand. For example, "The All new Messenger Plus! Live for Windows Live Messenger" is translated as "Messenger Plus! Live ใหม่กิ๊ก สำหรับ Windows Live Messenger". The "ใหม่กิ๊ก" doesn't even make sense, and "สำหรับ" is used for "for" instead of "ของ", which is more appropriate in this place, even though both words mean "for". What about ใหม่กิ๊ก? Well, in Thai, the adjective always follow, and NEVER precede. So instead of saying "new girlfriend" (though กิ๊ก is between a friend and a girlfriend), we say "girlfriend new". I know it sounds weird, but it should be "กิ๊กใหม่" in this place. He could also say "Messenger Plus! Live ใหม่! กิ๊กของ Windows Live Messenger", meaning "The new Messenger Plus! Live! Girlfriend of Windows Live Messenger". There are a lot more of these to be corrected. Even the "go" isn't succeeded by "to" when he says "go to live chat!", which makes it sound very coloquial. This does not happen only once or twice, but many times throughout the web...
Other than that, some sentences are grammatically correct, but sound a bit weird.. I mean... nobody would speak like that... It just sounds really unnatural.
My bet is either the translators rushed it or the translators' Thai is not so strong. Or perhaps he and/or she may not be good in languages. Even someone in an international school like me could do better than that...
EDIT: It seems like my firefox messed up the Thai characters... I'll try IE7...
EDIT2: Even IE7 leaves Thai characters as weird HTML character codes... I'll leave it as it is untill I find a solution then.
This post was edited on 09-06-2006 at 10:42 AM by Poom.
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