12:07 Nov 3, 2015 |
Japanese to English translations [PRO] Tech/Engineering - Engineering (general) / Wording intechnical instruction manuals | |||||||
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| Selected response from: Mitchell Coutinho (X) Netherlands Local time: 00:41 | ||||||
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Summary of answers provided | ||||
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4 +2 | It depends |
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5 | You are correct! |
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3 | - |
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Discussion entries: 8 | |
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It depends Explanation: As you have clearly noticed, there are situations in which the definite article (the) is omitted, and there are times when it is included. It is clear to me that you are not referring to the "zero article," which is part of English grammar. Instead, you appear to be referring to omission of the definite article even when grammar does not seem to call for it. There are limited situations in which the is omitted, and it tends to be done for practical purposes. Common examples are newspaper headlines, titles of books, messages written in a telegraph style, manuals, cooking recipes etc. In these cases, the definite article is omitted for the sake of brevity. Even though grammatically speaking you would normally use the article, its omission is accepted. In your first example sentence, both A and B are acceptable. In both instances, it is clear that there is only one Parameter button and that there is only one Parameter Screen, and that that one button has to be pressed to show the screen. In your second sentence, I would not recommend sentence A for the following reason: Firstly, when typed out in its entirety, the sentence would be "This is the ANRES app. software that we have developed." Notice that the relative pronoun that is actually a part of the sentence. It refers to the non-countable noun "(ANRES app.) software." Relative pronouns and non-countable nouns are a bad combination to have when you want to omit the definite article "the". Take a look at the following example: "I have one glass of milk. I gave the glass of milk to John, like I always do. He drank the milk." Let's combine these three sentences into an independent clause + relative clause: I gave a glass of milk to John. John drank the milk that I gave to him. Now we remove the article "the": I gave a glass of milk to John. John drank milk that I gave to him. Without the article "the," we don't know if John drank the glass of milk that I just gave him, or whether he drank milk that I gave him some other time. After all, I said that I always give him milk. So, to make it clear that he is drinking the milk that I described in the previous sentence, we need the article "the" before this non-countable noun. So, for sentence (2), translation A is ambiguous, and you should avoid it. My advice: If the manual you are translating is written very concisely, you can choose to omit the article "the" if you want. If the manual you are translating does not strike you as particularly concise, feel free to add the article. Including the article makes texts more pleasant to read in my opinion. |
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16 hrs confidence:
13 days confidence:
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