Front Panel Proof Reading Thread

[moacir]

Lovely idea the panel in Urdu - but never trust a dictionary. Usage is what counts.
I worked in SE Asia and we were doing lubricating oil packaging for a middle eastern country. The director over-ruled my choice of a UK translation service and saved money by going local. When the client saw it they fell about laughing because it was written in archaic formal Arabic - not great on an oil can. Then again if it doesn't exist you're inventing the terms that will be used henceforth, unto all the ages - a great responsibility!

Of course! I translated panels for other modules into a language in which I am fluent and still had immense difficulty because I never took an EE course in that language… but at least in that case I was able to scour online open-access EE academic journals to get relatively confident on how to say things like "low frequency oscillator" or "envelope" (not like something you put in a mailbox!). But even so, terms for those panels like "DC coupled" and "sample and hold" left me throwing up my arms.

I had one friend who is an America-born native Urdu speaker but was never in Urdu medium school have a look at the list above and just say "no chance."

That all said, something like Wikipedia is a useful source. You go to the English version of the page (say, for "Probability Distribution" instead of Marbles's "Spread") and see if there's an Urdu version. Then click through and look around and see if it's describing what you have in mind. Then cross-reference by googling the terms in question and consulting dictionaries. Unfortunately, Urdu Wikipedia is pretty thin (especially in comparison to, say, Persian or Hindi) and I have not been able to find a technical Urdu-English dictionary; the two book-version ones I own are for beginners like me, and the third, Platts's Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English is 140 years old and lacks a lot of technical vocabulary—and is risky anyway because it's so old and so comprehensive.

Anyway, even if there are no Urdu-fluent Wigglers, I might be able to trade modding another acquaintance's Volca for a thorough look at the list!

[cretaceousear]

Of course every term is an invention to try to describe something, and then familiarity makes it valid.
Sample and hold: "Bite but no chew"
I bet you could find a bilingual Urdu speaker online, a techy person in Pakistan?
Ah I see it's basically Hindu, transliterated into Arabic script, with a Persian influence.
The panels look great!

[moacir]

Ah I see it's basically Hindu, transliterated into Arabic script, with a Persian influence.

I think it's a bit more politically complicated… Hindi ("Hindu," in 2020, refers to the religion, not the language) and Urdu are effectively grammatically the same and have the same historical background, but they're written differently and have a different focus on sources of vocabulary. Urdu pulls more from Arabic and Persian, while Hindi has replaced a lot of those terms with Sanskrit sources. It's a bit like how people say "autumn" or "fall" in English. Neither is wrong, but one gestures towards Latin/French influence in English and the other to English's Germanic roots. And while there is a bit of politics in play in autumn/fall ("fall" was what we were using in the colonies while the Brits started getting fancy with their "autumns," leaving simple "fall" behind), it's nowhere near as contentious.

So in today's political climate, Hindi and Urdu suggest different histories of the northern part of the subcontinent. This makes the project especially tricky, because I can't just take a random Hindi word, transliterate it, and say "boom, Urdu."

I don't exactly know why Émilie has always referenced Hindustani classical music (the music of the northern part of the subcontinent) with her design and terminology choices for Mutable Instruments, though I love that she adds rāgas to presets. "Shruthi" (श्रुति) is, of course, a Sanskrit word, and it's written in nāgarī script on the MI Shruthi PCBs. The trend continues w/, for example, using nāgarī numbers (१, २, ३, ४) on the panels for Blinds and Tides.

Anyway, I have other resources I haven't tapped yet, but when I saw this thread, I figured it was also worth a shot!

[KSS]

^Thanks for this post, moacir! I learned something new.