Bug#720989: www.debian.org: unexperienced users fail to download installation media especially for usb drives
Thanks for your quick reply.
On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 10:04:18PM +0200, Holger Wansing wrote:
> Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de> wrote:
> > A few times he was amused and confused by the German translation and
> > wording. "Spiegel" (mirror) is not a widely used word neither in the
> > technical nor the non-technical communities. The language used appeared
> > unusual to him.
>
> As the current german translator for d-i, let me comment on this small part
> of the report:
>
> The translation work in general is a very thankless and hard job:
> - we mostly get no feedback
> - sometimes we get feedback like "translation to <language> is so poor,
> better skip to english". That's it, no proposals for improvements
> - very few times we get a hint on errors
> - very very very times we get patches or proposals
This is sad. Unfortunately my short paragraph on the German translation
is not constructive either. I included it, because it was an issue one
user had in my user interface testing, but this can be an outlier data
point.
I will try to establish a contact for proof reading the translation, but
at this point I cannot promise anything. Until you receive further
feedback from me, please drop the translation aspect from this bug
report.
> The next point is:
> The translation is used from people with very different knowledge base, what
> leads to some people claiming about:
> "the german word "Spiegel" is uncommon here, I don't know what
> this is",
> while others say
> "What the hell is 'mirror', why did the translator did not use a
> german word for this; this is a translation to german, isn't it?"
>
> So, in summary: what you do as translator, it is wrong anyway!!!
Let me propose something like "Spiegel (mirror)" here. It is slightly
longer, but I guess that almost every user will grasp one of the two.
> In this special case, my point of view is this:
> If it comes to duplicating a harddrive for example, the german word
> "spiegeln" is quite common! So "Spiegel" as a duplication of a server (or
> part of a server) is nothing but obvious.
I agree here. In the context of hard drives it is much more common. We
have to keep in mind that my testing targeted the very first impressions
and expectation of new users. Just because one user stumbles about a
term it does not imply that it is the wrong term.
This report started out from five ask.debian.net questions. I then
started to turn this into constructive feedback by running user studies.
Maybe we just need more studies to get feedback that is more useful?
Helmut
Reply to: