Free stats learning material for translation purposes?
Thread poster: nweatherdon
nweatherdon
nweatherdon
Canada
French to English
+ ...
Jan 29, 2013

I imagine it's probably easier to translate statistics, or recognize that you're dealing with statistics, if you understand it. A lot of not-so-crazy math stuff comes up all over the place in numerous fields and who knows how often you get funky translations of this stuff. So I'm wondering about learning materials which might be useful for translators, excluding dictionaries, compendiums, etc. I'm talking about materials to learn math & stats themselves.

As far as free resources, I'
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I imagine it's probably easier to translate statistics, or recognize that you're dealing with statistics, if you understand it. A lot of not-so-crazy math stuff comes up all over the place in numerous fields and who knows how often you get funky translations of this stuff. So I'm wondering about learning materials which might be useful for translators, excluding dictionaries, compendiums, etc. I'm talking about materials to learn math & stats themselves.

As far as free resources, I'm sure there are lots. I reckon the material in https://www.coursera.org/course/stats1 would be a good basic coverage, but they don't specify a start date for this course yet. They also have a course starting in March covering some other (slightly less) common stats tools. If those two courses look easy, perhaps https://www.coursera.org/course/fe would be interesting for a view of math and/or stats applications in finance.

Any other suggestions of free statistics and math related learning content for people in fields where understanding some stats (beyond mean and mode) would help in translating, such as in social sciences and natural sciences?
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Katalin Horváth McClure
Katalin Horváth McClure  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 20:23
Member (2002)
English to Hungarian
+ ...
Wikipedia, Khan Academy? Jan 30, 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/probability


 
Ambrose Li
Ambrose Li  Identity Verified
Canada
Local time: 20:23
English
+ ...
Udacity? Jan 30, 2013

No first hand experience, but they do have a couple of statistics courses.

https://www.udacity.com/courses


 
Emma Goldsmith
Emma Goldsmith  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 02:23
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
Statistics One experience Jan 30, 2013

njweatherdon wrote:

I reckon the material in https://www.coursera.org/course/stats1 would be a good basic coverage


I did this course when it ran last autumn and wouldn't describe it as basic coverage at all. The tagline for the course is "... friendly introduction to very simple, very basic, fundamental concepts in statistics" but that comes from someone whose whole world revolves around statistics.

The idea, as you say, to improve your understanding of a specific field for translation purposes is great. Translators tend to specialise, but as a medical translator I still need to have a good grasp of legal terminology, statistics (for clinical trials) and so on. The Statistics One course definitely helped me do this. It was discussed in a thread here on ProZ when the course ran last September: http://www.proz.com/forum/medical/231676-free_online_statistics_course.html and I also blogged about it here: http://signsandsymptomsoftranslation.com/2012/10/29/stats1-final/

In short, I'd recommend the course to non-stats translators who want to learn (quite a bit) about statistics.


 
Ambrose Li
Ambrose Li  Identity Verified
Canada
Local time: 20:23
English
+ ...
The difficulty of Coursera courses Jan 30, 2013

Emma Goldsmith wrote:

I did this course when it ran last autumn and wouldn't describe it as basic coverage at all. The tagline for the course is "... friendly introduction to very simple, very basic, fundamental concepts in statistics" but that comes from someone whose whole world revolves around statistics.


Almost all Coursera courses I have seen, I’d say, are like that. They are college level courses after all. I once tried another “basic level” statistics related course which, to my surprise, turned out to be graduate level. After a few lectures I just dropped out.


 


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Free stats learning material for translation purposes?







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