7/27/2011

Direct Modeling, Horseradish Leafs, BIM, and Google Translation


Yesterday, in my Russian blog, I published post “The CAD company, which is guided mainly by the opinions of current customers, will not be needed by them tomorrow” which was inspired by some hot discussions at isicad.ru. One of the discussions was about BIM (see "BIM Discussion Gets Heated in Russia", upFront.eZine #692. The second debate which is currently actively evolves is about direct modeling and it was initiated by a recent article "New Armor for Rhino by Dmitry Ushakov .

One of the readers advised me to translate my post into English, at least in order to please the mentioned CAD vendors as well as Martyn Day and Francis Bernard whom I quoted. I am not able to do this because my Russian original text is rather artistic:).  Maybe Google can help? However note that the same reader draw my attention to the wonderful translation proposed by Google for two particular words related to my post. Google seems to properly  translate Russian words list hrena into horseradish leaf but if you ask to translate hrenovyi list it gives you something different. Some explanation and excuse for this is as follows. On the one hand, reversing list hrena into hrenovyi list just corresponds to transformation of leaf of  horseradish into horseradish leaf (so that hrenovyi becomes precisely an adjective which in Russian is explicitly indicated by the ending). On the other hand, a Russian word hrenovyi, for some (strange – or natural?) reasons also means rotten, lousy… . Seems Google loves this variant much more and thus translates hrenovyi list as  f*cking sheet :).

You may ask what does direct modeling and BIM  have to do with a horseradish leaf? Well, in the acknowledgement part of my post I thanked Vladimir Talapov, the author of a fresh Russian bestseller book “Introduction to BIM” (392 pp.) published with a support of isicad, who (Vladimir) presented me not only a copy of his book but also a very important supplement – a bottle of liqueur based on horseradish leafs… See here a picture of both the book and bottle in "What Do You Need to Understand BIM Better" . I can definitely confirm that Vladimir is not only a brilliant expert and promoter of BIM but also an excellent specialist in Siberian liqueurs. As for Google Translator, everyone can judge for himself: this is Google's English version   of my Russian post in question.


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