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Comments on How can I un-translate these humourous 'translations' Windows terms, from Bengali?

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How can I un-translate these humourous 'translations' Windows terms, from Bengali? [closed]

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Closed as unclear by Jirka Hanika‭ on Jul 18, 2023 at 08:46

This question cannot be answered in its current form, because critical information is missing.

This question was closed; new answers can no longer be added. Users with the reopen privilege may vote to reopen this question if it has been improved or closed incorrectly.

Here's the image of the humourous 'translations', and my wife has helped me 'untranslate' some of them, but we're stuck on some:

image transcription below

Bill Gates has released Windows in a Bengali version called JANAALA 2016. Some terms which have been used:

Save - Basao Save As - Olah basao
Save All - Hokholre Basao
Help - Amare Basao
Mail - Sitti
Old - Furana
Replace - Bodlao
Run - Bhaago
Copy - Kofi
Cut - Khaato
Delete - Gulli Maro
Spreadsheet- Saddor Bisao
Database - Itar naam zanina
Exit - Baro
Compress - Tifa Maro
Mouse - Unduur
Scrollbar - Onthaki Hono, Honthaki Ono
Page Break - Khagoz Bango

My wife has been able to explain some of these, like 'Basao' is how you'd describe 'saving' beans or peas you take out of a pod. And Saddor Bisao' is like spreading a beadsheet.

I believe the 'dialect' of Bengali is Sylheti.

What are the rest of them?

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2 comment threads

Close reason (4 comments)
Multilingual humor (1 comment)
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Jirka Hanika‭ wrote over 1 year ago

It is unclear what is being asked due to too many layers of perceived or real humor involved.

Those terms appear to mean, in this context, what already the question suggests that they mean. In other contexts, they may mean also different things, but that doesn't "define" those terms.

pureferret ‭ wrote over 1 year ago

How could I better define what I'm expecting in an answer?

Jirka Hanika‭ wrote over 1 year ago

Microsoft released Bengali Windows. It uses Bengali equivalents to various computer terminology. As it happens in every language, those terms are often derived (as metaphors and otherwise) from Bengali concepts and terms that predate computer technology; . (The origin of a particular word or phrase is called its "etymology" and it's often traceable even to an ancestor language or contact language of Bengali, such as Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, or Turkish. Those etymologies are mostly easy to google up.)

A fluent speaker of Bengali can have a lot of fun when encountering a lot of technical terminology in Bengali for the first time in their life, over some of the choice of words. However, that subjective feeling doesn't last long and it's also not the case that every such term will feel hilarious even just to that one person. It also doesn't mean that the company who created Bengali Windows intended the release to be a widely understood joke.

There's nothing to "un-translate".

matthewsnyder‭ wrote about 1 year ago

Microsoft used to be notorious, back in Win 98 days, for very poorly made localizations of their software. I think that in the bad old days before the internet, a lot of their developers were clustered in the US, so localizations were done by people who didn't actually know the language very well and/or hadn't used it in a long time. To be fair to MS, many countries at the time did not have a well developed IT sector, so the native language vocabulary didn't exist for software concepts that had been invented in the west just a few years prior.

But I think even more developed countries like France had to deal with bad localizations in the 90s.

In any case, now that MS is much more global, I would expect them to get better at it. But perhaps not, who knows.