Talk:Ángela Ruiz Robles

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Awful translation![edit]

I fear the notoriously bad Google Translate was used for the English translation of the description of the device. I'll look at the original Spanish version and see if I can produce something better - which I surely can, since anything's better than Google Translate! I'm a professional English translator, and one of my source languages is Spanish. Back again soon!213.127.210.95 (talk) 16:37, 28 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Spanish version contains a surprising number of misprints (such as 'los misma' - masculine plural with feminine singular, which breaks basic rules of Spanish grammar), so I fear it may be a bad copy (or scan?) of the original text. It is also harder to follow than it might be, which again suggests to me that it is a distortion of the original - but the novelty of the technology back in 1949 (in a socially conservative and technologically less advanced country such as Spain then was, just ten years after the end of the Civil War) may also have resulted in a somewhat tortuous description. In any case, I've managed to produce a much clearer English version, which I will take the liberty of inserting in the main article later on. As just one example of how bad the existing translation is, the word 'Cerrado' ('Closed', or better 'When closed'), contrasting with 'Abierto' ('Open', or better 'When opened') at the beginning of the text, is rendered as 'Complex', which is meaningless here, so the whole sentence is gibberish: 'Complex, is the size of an ordinary book and simple operations' (in my translation 'When closed, it is the same size as an ordinary book, and easy to handle').213.127.210.95 (talk) 18:06, 28 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
One reason why I'm so keen to get this translation right is that I'm stunned by Ángela Ruiz Robles's technological skill a full 70 years ago, in a country then hardly renowned for its scientific achievements, but all the more renowned for its fiercely sexist attitudes - and above all shocked by the lack of recognition her skill seems to have received (only yesterday, in early 2018, did I learn of her brilliant invention, which was patented in Spain a full five years before the illustrious Alan Turing died). As far as I'm aware, her picture has never even appeared on a postage stamp, in Spain or anywhere else. But I'm certainly going to write a blog post and tell all my friends about her. Three cheers for Ángela the teacher and inventor!213.127.210.95 (talk) 18:25, 28 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]