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and bounded than natural languages; yet, the conversion tools may be
unsatisfactory because, while syntactic conversion is feasible, the semantics
do not come across well. Why do semantics not do well? The conversion
may be too literal, or suboptimal or inelegant.
Gregory Rabassa, the noted translator of Spanish fiction, in his topic
entitled
If This Be Treason — Translation and Its Discontents, A Memoir
,
speaks of his colleague Pete Weston:
“Not satisfied with all the foreign tongues he had gathered in
and learned well, Pete invented one of his own. As I think
about it now I feel that it could be the basis for a test in
translation. Why not make up your own language and then
translate something from it into your native tongue, faithfully
and making note of all difficulties you might come across? Then
you could reverse the process and see if the new language is
adequate for the translation of your native tongue.”
Migration versus Porting
We can now see the difference between migration and porting. In migra-
tion, one moves away from what one is migrating, in most cases replacing
the system being migrated. In porting, one creates a new version but the
old version does not go away. An Accounts Receivable package migrated
from VSAM to Oracle most probably would result in the retirement of the
VSAM application and the existence in production of the Oracle version
only. However, a CRM (customer relational management) package initially
running on Sybase gets ported to Informix, or is supported on a different
OS (operating system) or a different flavor of the OS, and yet support for
all versions continues. Migration as a term should be used for one-off
modifications done in IT (information technology) environments. Porting,
correspondingly, is done by vendors who develop products and have to
support multiple platforms. Although there are similarities in the work
involved, the strategies that one can adopt and the options available are
different.
Migration versus Reengineering
Is migration the same as reengineering? Possibly — the difference being
one of the degree of change between source and destination. There are
different expectations about the scope of work, the complexity involved,
and, in a basic sense, project objectives. Many avoid the term “reengi-
neering” because it evokes memories of the times when it was seen by
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