Re: [1.8.0] use 'stage' term consistently

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: May 8, 2012, 08:55 UTC
Message-ID: <CACBZZX7LOKqKNe09636N0xJ_VvmKP58BMDtjoKn1t5e9hJ0OiQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v62c71fl7.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 6:06 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> I didn't necessarily wanted to use "stage", it is "sad" because a
> new word-hunt may be needed for a replacement to "index" (as "stage" may
> not be a good word for i18n audience), and then we would need to keep
> "index", "stage" and that third word as interchangeable terms.
>
> Spliting the userbase by introducing a new form to an established
> terminology was bad enough, and making that three is worse.

I don't think that line of reasoning makes sense at all. We shouldn't be picking terms in the original English translation of Git that we think would be more amenable to translation.

We should be picking terms that make the most sense in English, and then translators will translate those into whatever makes the most sense in their language.

How translators work also depends largely on the language they're translating the terms into. In my experience there's three main modes of translation that people aim for:

 * Do we have a common word for it already? If so use, it, if not
   let's just use the English word. Japanese and German largely fall
   into this category.

 * Do we have a word for it at all or can we concoct one that makes
   sense? If so let's try to use it. Some languages like German are
   evidently struggling with the boundary between this and the first
   category.

 * What ideas are these terms trying to convey, and do we have an
   equivalent for those ideas in our language that we can use?
   Icelandic translations mostly aim for this.

So e.g. for Icelandic I'm not aiming to translate the shipping / military concept of "stage".

I'm looking at what it means in the workflow of git (a staging are for commits before they're born) and using a word you'd use in Icelandic if you were trying to talk about some staging/preparation area.

That I have to do this isn't a failure of the original English version, it's an inevitable emergence of different languages using different terms and patterns to express similar ideas.