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Comment by random_visitor | Hacker News Reader

"4 out of 20" was directly mentioned by him, stating that a it's unlikely that you open 20 PR to random repos and every one of them is marked spam in next 7 days.

> I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs

This is the translation of his long winded explanation rationalizing on how "Improved docs" PR which adds "Awesome project" to docs is actually an improvement, and the PR is just asking the owner to incorporate these "improvements" to his codebase. Spam wasn't directly worded (I don't remember there being a hindi word for that), but he explicitly mentioned to write random crap in the docs and post it to repos they find on page 100 of repo search, so I guess that's a plausible enough to be translated as "spam".

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Is there any translated transcription of the video? It seems established that "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs" is not an translated quote but rather an interpretation of the underlying meaning. That is good and all but I would prefer seeing the original source myself, and since it is in a different language, an translation that is as close to the original as possible.

The translation I am most interested in is the 1 minute before and after the "4 out of 20".

Languages aren't mathematics, you can't losslessly translate between them. All translations are at least to some degree "an interpretation of the underlying meaning".

As someone who was raised bilingual, I always struggle when asked to translate a specific phrase between languages because literal translations are often less useful or accurate than the "interpreted" translation. I would be very suspicious of anyone who claims they have translated something someone else said without changing its meaning at all.

I have huge respect for the difficult job of translators and there is a definitive distinction between a paraphrase and a quote. I personal know professional translators and a key aspect of that role that they like to talk about is how they are proud to avoid making personal interpretation of the underlying meaning and instead relay as exact as possible what has been said and how it was said so that the client can interpret the meaning.

As an example of that, translators sometimes get jobs to translate at parties like weddings, and sometimes a drunk person comes up to the client and try to hit on them. If the person is muttering then the translator translate the muttering. If they are rambling they translate the rambling. They don't interpret and tell the client that the person is hitting on them, and they don't hide the drunk speech by making it sounds more coherent. Their job is to relay what is being said as exact as the two languages allows it. Naturally as languages has different concepts and ways to express things you do not get a lossless translation, but you do get the nearest translation based on the skill of the translator.

Yes, skilled professional translators who are native-level in both languages are possibly the closest to a perfect translation you can find and arguably they are one of the reasons that international diplomacy is at all workable (though they are still imperfect, purely because languages represent concepts with different nuances, and translating the nuance of any given phrase could require distilling an entire lifetime of cultural experience into a few sentences). That being said, I doubt you'll find one on HN who is going to bother to translate a Hindi video about how to create spam PRs, so you'll have to make do with a native speaker (who isn't a professional translator) has said -- hence my comment.

And my follow-up comment about being suspicious was about the vast majority of people who do translations (especially online), and I would go so far as to argue that some degree of suspicion should also be applied when newspapers use translations as though they are direct quotations. But I wasn't (generally speaking) talking about professional translators.

I don't think that I will get a professional translation but sometimes HN do surprise me, and I generally consider it worth a shot to ask for it when I see two people making quotes with quotations marks about the same translation.

I fully agree that translation should make one suspicious, especially those involving politics. When news in my native language has translations from English (second language) that sounds just a bit too much on the nose it usually prompt me to go and read the original source. Almost every time i find that the original statements involve a lot of contextual nuances.

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