prima del riutilizzo che ne sovrascrive le informazioni (in context)

20:21 Feb 8, 2009 

My last post on this subject ... honestly I still can't see where the issue is. The sentence makes perfect sense to me, and it's not that horribly written either. I certainly do not see it as garbage. Maybe it's because it's my native language and you end up loving it no matter what, who knows ... or perhaps it's because I've trained myself to read in many languages that are very different in structure (German, Russian, Hungarian, French...) and after a while you become good at grasping the spirit of (almost) everything you read. Well, I've given my 2 cents, now it's up to you.

19:32 Feb 8, 2009 

I can't tell you how many times I've been given badly written, badly thought-out Italian garbage and asked to translate it. Strictly speaking, the translator should translate Italian garbage into English garbage but of course if you do that, they accuse of doing a bad translation. The result is that you have to become an author far more skilled and precise than the author whose work you're translating. And that author will take all the credit for having written a brilliant piece.

19:20 Feb 8, 2009 

Yes, but people should also write as clearly as possible and not leave things to interpretation, especially when what they are conveying is a fairly simple concept. However, mine is a Utopia and we just have to grin and bear it.

19:11 Feb 8, 2009 

After all, reading a sentence and translating involves often logical deduction. Understanding what you're reading helps when translating, right?

19:08 Feb 8, 2009 

I agree, Arrigo, but to be perfectly honest I think that the whole thing makes sense once you realise that it would be nonsensical if they were referring to copying over the tapes. In other words, its a question of logical deduction, not anything contained in the structure of the sentence. At least as far as I can make out.

18:53 Feb 8, 2009 

Still can't see where the big mystery is. A bit twisted, yes, but perfectly understandable. If you use tapes to backup data, it's quite obvious to me that the overwriting concerns the original support, not the tapes. You write on the tapes once, label them, and keep them as a backup.

18:44 Feb 8, 2009 

Yeah, I was discussing it with a mothertongue for half an hour and he was as perplexed as both you and me. Like you, I interpreted it (I still think legitimately) as overwriting the data on the tapes, and I was compeltely thrown by this. Luckily Arrigo has come to the rescue and I find his scheme convincing.

18:39 Feb 8, 2009 

The Italian original is so badly written that try as I might, I can't make any sense of it. I can't work out if it's about (a) overwriting data on the tapes (which would mean deleting whatever was on them before, which makes a nonsense of what then follows) or (b) physically writing on the tapes so that people can remember what's on them.

So it's all wild guesswork.