Re: Complaint regarding website translation
Hello there!
* Miguel de Oliveira Martins <miguel.oliveira.martins@gmail.com> [2010-04-16 11:40:38 CEST]:
> Dear Sirs,
And Madams.
> Although I do realize that you must receive hundreds (if not
> thousands) of emails per week, I simply had to try my best to get a
> message through, which I truly hope you’ll read.
It's bearable on this list, to be honest.
> Firstly, I love Debian. I love the distro itself, its community, its
> underlying beliefs… geez, I even love its color-scheme!
Thanks, it's great to hear that - such feedback is way to rare anyway.
> Although I appreciate the efforts in trying to translate “truck-loads”
> of information into Portuguese (which is my mother tongue), I think
> you should be aware that the text, syntax, semantics, grammar and
> overall spelling are truly awful.
Would you be interested in the spirit of the above mentioned love to
help out in a community way and work on that translation with the
current people? That would be terrific! The current portuguese
translation coordinator is quite busy these days - I hope he though
still can help you out and answer. Also you are invited to subscribe to
the debian-l10n-portuguese mailinglist on which the efforts are supposed
to get coordinated: <http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-portuguese/>
> Even worse, despite constantly changing the language back to English,
> I keep on being redirected to the “Portuguese” version of the website,
> which can be truly annoying and might frustrate the expectations of
> people in a similar situation. Personally, I’m starting to avoid the
> website because of that, which is a shame.
See the link next to the language selection at the bottom about how the
displayed content is chosen, it has instructions for the various
browsers how to switch because the website depends on what your browser
sends it that you prefer: <http://www.debian.org/intro/cn>
> I know that the person reading this – hopefully reading, I should say
> – most likely isn’t Portuguese. I’m certainly not blaming anyone. Like
> I said, I appreciate the colossal effort behind all of it. However,
> please be aware that this particular situation denigrates Debian’s
> image.
I am indeed not speaking, reading or writing any Portuguese. See above
links about where you can direct your offer for help (hopefully) and
whom to contact you, Felipe is in explicit copy with this mail.
> To sum up, my main complaints are, as follows:
>
> - The website sais it’s in Portuguese, which is redundant, since it
> does not specify if it’s from Portugal or from Brazil;
>
> - From reading it, any Portuguese-speaking visitor perfectly
> identifies it as being Brazilian Portuguese (which should be specified,
> nonetheless);
Yes, Felipe is from Brazil, well perceived.
> - Some of the mistakes are truly painful to read, which might lead
> one to assume it was written by a twelve year-old (harsh, I know, but true
> nonetheless);
I am from the German team and we have such complaints at times, too.
All I can say with that: Please be concrete with the examples so they
can get fixed directly - or even better, submit a patch yourself. The
general overview page about how the website is organized is on
<http://www.debian.org/devel/website/> and most importantly the
<http://www.debian.org/devel/website/using_cvs> page.
> - I’m beginning to convince my firm to implement Debian for
> general office use, but feel that it will not offer any credibility
> once my partners read the website;
Maybe it helps to state that there usually is much better quality
assurance involved in the translation of desktop applications - out of
sheer amount of people using it and investing time, which might be
considered almost endlessly more than what there is put into the
translation of the website.
> - For what it’s worth, I’m a legal practitioner in my home
> country, specialized in international law, an information which I hope
> renders my criticism well-founded;
Beware - people in the free software community often react quite
alergic to lawyers.
> - I practically have no spare time to myself, but if you need
> some sort of proof-reader (or even translator) for Portuguese from
> Portugal, I will gladly give back some of the dedication that the
> Debian developers have offered us over the years, without ever asking
> for anything in return.
Even the smallest bit can help, so please don't refrain because you
think it's not much. Your mail must have cost you a fine bit of time
too, if you could send along concrete examples it could even have gotten
fixed already!
> Thank you for reading this, for your hard-work and for a wonderful
> distribution.
Thank you for your kind words!
Rhonda
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