Caution with languages!

Update — November 19, 2020

The Tonalibus website is now available also in French and Italian, besides German and the original English. By default this site appears in the language of your system settings or geographic region. You can manually set the language with the rightmost main menu option on top of every screen by selecting the small American, Swiss, French or Italian flag.

It took a lot of fine-tuning to have these languages reasonably well aligned. Actually it was surprising how inconsistent and often inaccurate automatic translation engines still are. One of the supposedly best of them provided the initial translations of the Tonalibus website and continues to dynamically translate elements on this site. Therefore, the below warning remains in full force:

When in doubt about a statement on this website, please refer to the original English version.

Caution with languages!

Languages are a challenge. Each is its own, alive, and keeps evolving with use.

We can see communication as an approximation, a more or less imperfect attempt to point out something, the best we can. Words serve as pointers to images, to form stories. To what extent another can grasp an image or story being passed on, depends to a large extent on the language used, one’s choice of words. Poor language may pass on inaccurate images and meanings, and as such distort a story.

This compounds the challenge of translations. After we transpose an image or story from one language to another, will it still be the same? Chances are more than big, that this will not entirely be so. But for one who lives within another language, even a limited translation is far better than none.

Automatic system-generated translations have improved a lot over recent years and continue to do so. Using them, we tend to loose subtleties. Some things may even become more or less distorted. Nevertheless, such translations accomplish a lot and help in passing on images and stories, with more or less accuracy, especially when one is warned and aware of this.

Thus, be warned: Caution with languages! To some extent, the Tonalibus website uses system-generated, automatic translations to offer itself also in languages other than its original English. Therefore, as possible or when in doubt about a statement in another language on this website, please refer to the English version.

Initially, Tonalibus offers only German (in Swiss style) as language other than English. French and Italian may follow. Further, if there is demand for it, other languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Japanese, or Chinese, etc. could be enabled on the Tonalibus website — though with considerable distortions and inaccuracies in their expressions, unless first verified in detail.