Re: Translation process (was: [PATCH 3/5] Internationalization of git-gui)

From: Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de>
Date: Jul 21, 2007, 18:50 UTC
Message-ID: <200707212050.48568.stimming@tuhh.de>
In-Reply-To: <85ps2l98eq.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

Am Samstag, 21. Juli 2007 15:46 schrieb David Kastrup:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Christian Stimming <stimming@tuhh.de> writes:
> > And a new German translation, so far 100% but many more strings are to
> > come.
>
> I have somewhat different proposals which sound less awkward, I
> think.  Of course, it is always a matter of taste whether a technical
> term should really be translated always, but assuming that, I'll make
> some German proposals.  Some may be tongue in cheek.

Thanks for the suggestions. However, I don't think it is of much worth to discuss individual message translations *right now*; instead, here's what I would propose instead:

The most difficult issue in a program translation is to find good translation wordings for those key words which are used each and every time throughout the program. Once you've decided on a particular translation for each of these words, the rest is just grunt work. So the important part is to translate these key words. Incidentally, I've added the file po/glossary.cvs for exactly this purpose. In there you find my current collection of key words that occur throughout git-gui (and git, for that matter), including a set of proposed translations to German language. This should be the place where the keyword translations should be discussed first. The discussion of the actual translations should be deferred until after the glossary translations have been discussed and agreed upon.

(I'm unsure whether the translations should be kept in the same glossary file; in the glossary for the gnucash project [1] we've actually added an extra directory and encourage translators to add an extra po file for their glossary translations. However, the glossary of gnucash has more than 150 terms and many of them require to be defined clearly as well, as translators would otherwise be unable to translate them concisely. In git-gui, the glossary is 25 terms so far and I think the git documentation already contains enough definitions of all of them. Nevertheless, maybe it would make a better structure if the translations of the glossary are kept in a separate po file for each language. Hm.)

In short: Please discuss the glossary first, and not the actual de.po message file. Once the glossary has been decided upon, the de.po will be adapted, and *after that* a discussion of de.po makes sense. But not before that.

Regards,

Christian

[1] http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/browser/gnucash/trunk/po/glossary/gnc-glossary.txt