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satt comments on Open Thread, Jun. 8 - Jun. 14, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I’m trying to translate some material from LessWrong for a friend (interested with various subjects aborded here, but can’t read english…), and I’m struggling to find the best translation for “evidence”. I have many candidates, but every one of them is a little bit off relative to the connotation of "evidence". Since it’s a so central term in all the writings here, I figured out that it could not be bad to spend a little time finding a really good translation, rather than a just-okayish one.
English readers : - Could you find a few different sentences that would cover all (slighty differenrt) usages of evidence ? The objective is, if my translation fit well in all those propositions, there is good chances that it will fit well in everything i may want to translate. For example, from wiki : “Evidence for a given theory is the observation of an event that is more likely to occur if the theory is true than if it is false” “Generalization from fictional evidence” “Conservation of expected evidence”. I except that finding a translation that will cover equally well those three usages will basically cover any usage, but can you think of a 4th usage that may prove problematic even for a term that fit well for the 3 others ? - What would be the less bad synonym of “evidence” : clue, proof, observation, sign (that’s basically my best candidates, translated back in english). I dislike all of them, but that’s the best candidates I found, translated back in english. (substitute evidence in all the test sentences abole, and you will understand my problem. “Clue for a given theory…” is somewhat good, but “conservation of expected clue” less so…)
French readers, if any :
J’ai comme candidats : « preuve », « indice », « signe », « observation ». D’autres propositions ? Laquelle vous semble la meilleure ?
Thanks for your cooperation.
(and don’t get me started on “entangled with”, I think I will lose much hair trying to find an acceptable translation for that one. French sucks.)
Of those four, I like "clue" the most. As Lumifer says, the word "proof" in English arguably connotes evidence supporting something; "sign" might have a similar problem; and "observation" feels a bit too vague to me, since an observation may be irrelevant to a hypothesis and hence not evidence at all.
The singular "clue" doesn't read well to me in the phrase "conservation of expected clue", but I think pluralizing it may help ("conservation of expected clues"). It might be feasible to invent a new word meaning something like "clueness", which might align better with the technical meaning of "evidence".
That said, if I examine how "preuve" is actually translated from French to English in official documents, the French "preuve" does sometimes seem to mean "evidence" in pretty much the English sense. So maybe "preuve" doesn't have the potential connotation (of evidence in support of a hypothesis) that Lumifer worries about.
Perhaps "intriqué avec"?
(It occurred to me that French quantum physicists must have had to deal with the phrase "entangled with" for a long time, so one could simply borrow whatever French translation those physicists use.
I went to English Wikipedia's "Quantum entanglement" entry to look at the sidebar's list of alternative languages. It links to the French entry "Intrication quantique", though that title isn't the answer, because "intrication" is a noun, not an adjectival phrase. However, the entry's second sentence mentions (in bold, helpfully) "état intriqué", which certainly looks like "entangled state", and when I Google the phrase "entangled with" along with "intrication" & "quantique", I see snippets of French like "intriqués avec" and "états quantiques intriqués". Googling "intriqué avec" confirms that the phrase is used in French discussions of quantum mechanics in contexts where it seems to mean "entangled with".)
Yes, "intrication" is the standard translation of "entanglement" in QM. But nobody else uses it, and therefore I fear there is an obvious failure mode where someone Googles it and start shouting "WTF is that?"