RE: [PHP-DOC] Please - Simple is better

On 19 August 2003 00:35, Hafid wrote: > Hi > > > These are extremely simple examples of English, and should not be > > in the least difficult to understand. I have to say that, in my > > opinion, if you cannot easily follow the meaning of these, your > > understanding of English must be extremely basic, and certainly not > > up to the job of translating a technical document such as the PHP > > manual. > > I find your comments partly true when you say that the examples I gave > [should not be in the least difficult to understand] mainly > that you SEEM to > be talking as a programmer and thinking that all people are > programmers or should be to. No, I'm talking as a former programmer who has also spent 10+ years as a technical editor writing and editing documents aimed at all levels of user from beginner upwards. My comments were made because I could not see any possible way of misinterpreting those sentences if you apply the basic rules of English grammar and then examine the results phrase by phrase. If you think there is ambiguity in those sentences, then your level of understanding of English is simply not up to the job. > > example 1 >> Must be writable by whatever user PHP is running as. > > Generally speaking, the sentence seems to be clear mainly the > first part > [Must be writable by whatever user] but the problem is that > for a newcomer > PHP is a language / software. And when seeing this sentence, > I ask myself if > I'm talking about: > - PHP running as a USER or > - PHP running in a certain WRITABLE MODE. I simply don't see how you can extract the second meaning from the sentence as presented. Your grouping seems to be simply wrong. Perhaps part of your problem is that this is not a full sentence, but a verb-object fragment with an implied subject (presumably something referring to a file or directory), which deconstructs as follows: ? -- implied subject Must be writable -- verb phrase by -- preposition the user PHP is running as -- noun phrase (object) I cannot see any other reasonable parsing of this phrase. > example 2 >> The following table describes some of the extensions > available and required additional dlls. > > I don't know which meaning do I have to take: > - some of the [AVAILABLE extensions] and [required additional > DLLs] or > - some of the [extensions' ] [available and required additional DLLs] Again, your second proposal makes no kind of sense -- especially with that added possessive apostrophe, which in itself should be a major clue. In fact, both your proposed interpretations are *less* clear than the original -- I've now read both of them several times, and I don't think *either* of them captures the meaning of the original sentence. Your first interpretation, whilst theoretically possible, doesn't really make sense -- why would we be talking about *required* DLLs isolated from but in the same sentence as *optional* DLLs? To have proposed this meaning demonstrates a misunderstanding of the semantics of this sentence -- the addition of the conjunction "and required additional DLLs" directly to "extensions required" makes these implicitly connected, so that the understanding is that the DLLs are "required" by the "extensions available" -- so I would render this more as "... some of the (available extensions and [their] required additional DLLs" (note the explicit insertion of an implied possessive). (Incidentally, I would say that there's a subtle difference between "extensions available" and "available extensions", but I'm not sure it's relevant to this discussion (or that I could even accurately express the difference in just a few words!).) Your second proposed interpretation, on the other hand, is clearly nonsense -- "available" could not possibly be the object of a possessive as it's not a noun but a verb participle; and if you leave the apostrophe out, "extensions ... required additional DLLS" is also a nonsense. If I've correctly interpreted what you're driving at with this one, it would have to be written thus to have sensible meaning: "... some of the extensions available and extensions' required additional DLLs" -- which, now I look at it, is, in fact, pretty close to the meaning I derived above. Again, by inserting an implied possessive, this would come out to "... some of the extensions available, and [those] extensions' required additional DLLs" -- which is pretty much the same as above, but expressed in a slightly wordier fashion. > I also accept your remarks and I'm really interested in your > work because it > is simply GREAT and HUGE and I hope you continue your > creativity. But don't > forget noone creates just for himself and that if we oblige > someone to be > specialist in a field to translate in it, we won't translate anything. Well, the only field I think I'm requiring you to be a specialist in for these examples is the English language. I accept that some of the individual words might be quite obscure -- especially the regular everyday ones used with a completely different specialist meaning -- but a good technical dictionary should help there, or even an online "geek-speak" resource such as http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/contents.html or http://www.whatis.com/. Cheers! Mike --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike Ford, Electronic Information Services Adviser, Learning Support Services, Learning & Information Services, JG125, James Graham Building, Leeds Metropolitan University, Beckett Park, LEEDS, LS6 3QS, United Kingdom Email: m.ford@lmu.ac.uk Tel: +44 113 283 2600 extn 4730 Fax: +44 113 283 3211