Re:Wikipedia is getting a new look
by dheera on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @02:56PM
(#24570577)
> 1. Finding canonical translations for technical terms.
OMG yes I do this as well. Google translate is unreliable for technical terms, regional vegetables/fruits, cultural concepts, and lots of other things.
EDIT: Wikipedia is also good at differentiating regional variants of a language, e.g. the country of Laos is 老撾 in Beijing Mandarin and 寮國 in Taiwanese Mandarin and Wikipedia knows this. Likewise, a USB drive is almost universally called "U盤" in Mainland China but this word is virtually unknown outside Mainland China. It's actually a good way for native speakers to look up one-off words like this when writing documents intended to be read by another region because you really just need to replace a few nouns here and there.
OMG yes I do this as well. Google translate is unreliable for technical terms, regional vegetables/fruits, cultural concepts, and lots of other things.
EDIT: Wikipedia is also good at differentiating regional variants of a language, e.g. the country of Laos is 老撾 in Beijing Mandarin and 寮國 in Taiwanese Mandarin and Wikipedia knows this. Likewise, a USB drive is almost universally called "U盤" in Mainland China but this word is virtually unknown outside Mainland China. It's actually a good way for native speakers to look up one-off words like this when writing documents intended to be read by another region because you really just need to replace a few nouns here and there.