Link: http://www.etc-architect.com/?p=819
From ETC-Architect
If I translate from English to German I will loose a lot of content even if I use the best translators. Now this a normal and expected behavior well known and the reason that we keep translations to a minimum.
Now comes the architects and deliberately or undeliberately forgets that this same wisdom also applies to artificial languages such as UML, various ontologies, Java, .NET, Python, JS, etc. Just remember after the first translation we lose 20 % of the original meaning and after 4 translation virtually nothing is left at all.
To make things really bad we then claim without any foundation that we diffuse it all with some simple tricks and are quite willing to use several languages in each area of architecture. Quite frankly linguist have found via decade long research that if you the best translators in the world after 4 translations you can keep 10 % of the original meaning, but that is top and requires techniques I have never seen.
So if we employ 4-20 languages and ontologies in large projects and at the end the result is not what was asked for we may have the answer if we just think a bit about basic linguistic.
