# Translation of Documents



## Zipper730 (Nov 2, 2022)

There are numerous members who speak German fluently, Shinpachi speaks Japanese fluently, and I'm curious how many people speak Russian fluently? In order of translation difficulty (at least for English readers/speakers), I would say Japanese would clearly be the highest, then Russian, with German being the least difficult (not that I'd consider any of them to be easy).

When it comes to Cold-War aircraft the ability to translate them into English would be quite useful IMHO.

Updates: I'm tagging the following members because of their ability to translate Japanese (

 Shinpachi
), Russian (

 ARTESH
, 

 Dimlee
, potentially 

 Wurger
).

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## pbehn (Nov 2, 2022)

Zipper730 said:


> There are numerous members who speak German fluently,
> 
> Shinpachi
> speaks Japanese fluently, and I'm curious how many people speak Russian fluently? In order of translation difficulty, I would say Japanese would clearly be the highest, then Russian, with German being the least difficult (not that I'd consider any of them to be easy).
> ...


There are 1.6 billion people who speak Chinese and Japanese fluently as children, they are therefore a remarkably easy languages to learn. Japanese and Chinese are different languages but one of the three Japanese alphabets Kanji is of Chinese characters.


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## GrauGeist (Nov 2, 2022)

There are several members here, who speak Russian (and other variations of Cyrillic) as well as Polish.

All of which would be useful in translating Cold War Soviet and Warsaw Pact documents.


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## Zipper730 (Nov 2, 2022)

GrauGeist
,
Which ones, so I can tag them?


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## GrauGeist (Nov 2, 2022)

Zipper730 said:


> GrauGeist
> ,
> 
> Which ones, so I can tag them?


Wurger: Polish
Dimlee: Russian
Artesh: Farsi, Polish, Russian

Several others, I can't think of their name (or spelling) at the moment.

I know Bulgarian, but it has slight differences from Russian, both in text and speech.


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## Shinpachi (Nov 2, 2022)

pbehn said:


> There are 1.6 billion people who speak Chinese and Japanese fluently as children, they are therefore a remarkably easy languages to learn. Japanese and Chinese are different languages but one of the three Japanese alphabets Kanji is of Chinese characters.


Also, Hiragana and Katakana letters came from Kanji(Chinese characters). It is amazing that Chinese can read all Japanese letters easily.

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## pbehn (Nov 2, 2022)

Shinpachi said:


> Also, Hiragana and Katakana letters came from Kanji(Chinese characters). It is amazing that Chinese can read all Japanese letters easily.


I was speaking purely as a "westerner" Kanji characters are what we recognise as "Chinese" even though the origin of all are in fact Chinese. The Japanese engineers I worked with used all three plus English in their faxes to Japan. Engineering technical terms and some idiom was just written straight in English not translated. So you would see a block of Japanese test with things like "Free on Board" or "Counter punch" in English in the middle. In China written Chinese is the same but people from all parts of the country have slightly different ways of writing the characters, it took my translator some time to get used to everyones writing style, as all were from different regions of China. Very occasionally he couldnt understand the local people speaking, so they wrote things down and understood straight away.


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## Shinpachi (Nov 2, 2022)

pbehn said:


> I was speaking purely as a "westerner" Kanji characters are what we recognise as "Chinese" even though the origin of all are in fact Chinese. The Japanese engineers I worked with used all three plus English in their faxes to Japan. Engineering technical terms and some idiom was just written straight in English not translated. So you would see a block of Japanese test with things like "Free on Board" or "Counter punch" in English in the middle. In China written Chinese is the same but people from all parts of the country have slightly different ways of writing the characters, it took my translator some time to get used to everyones writing style, as all were from different regions of China. Very occasionally he couldnt understand the local people speaking, so they wrote things down and understood straight away.


Simplified or modified, basic impression for a letter is same.

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## Zipper730 (Nov 3, 2022)

I remember there were certain programs that can effectively read text in pdf's and images and interpret it as text, then write it as text: I'm curious if anybody has such a program, I can give you the documents and you can run it through the program.



 Snowygrouch
,
From what I remember, you used such a program, correct?


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