Re: Installer branding
On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 11:29:39PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 04:03:35PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > changes differently. This means that I ended up making changes like:
> >
> > "Insert a Debian CD-ROM"
> > "Insert an Ubuntu CD-ROM"
> >
> > "Serwer lustrzany z archiwum Debiana:"
> > "Serwer lustrzany z archiwum Ubuntu:"
> >
> > "???? ???????? ???????????? ???? ??????????"
> > "???? ???????? ???????????? ???? ??????????????"
> [...]
> > So, it would be really nice if we could make the whole translation
> > branding thing less of a problem. One easy approach is to observe that
> > not all those strings really need to mention Debian in the first place.
> > In a number of places, they could be replaced by "the system" or "the
> > installer" or whatever without losing any information: users already
> > have a pretty good idea they're installing Debian because they got this
> > CD with "Debian" printed on it, or they downloaded it from a Debian FTP
> > site.
>
> That would be a possible approach, but it could mean you get awkward
> sentences if you're not careful; and if you are careful and err on the
> safe side, you might end up with a situation that isn't far from what
> you have now, making the whole effort moot. I'm afraid that approach
> isn't going to work.
I think it's pretty doable actually; and it doesn't have to be perfect,
it just has to be better than the current absolute hell. :-)
> > Another approach is to try to avoid mentioning the distribution name in
> > the middle of sentences so that it doesn't have to appear in translated
> > strings at all.
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean; however, in the general case,
> it is not a good idea to depend on the position of a word in one
> language to make translations less of a problem, as that simply will not
> work. See the ngettext() documentation for an extensive discussion of
> that case. I'm quite sure that approach isn't going to work either.
Oh, I'm familiar with the positional problem; I've been buried
waist-deep in these issues for nearly a year now. What I meant was
really to avoid mentioning the distribution name in translated sentences
at all, but to have it on its own in e.g. the top right-hand corner of
the screen so that it's still obvious to somebody glancing at the screen
what's going on. Things like "woody", "sarge", "sid" in select lists
don't need to be translated, and so on. I guess it's just a modification
of the first approach above.
> How about using a preprocessor on the .po files? I'm thinking of having
> msgstr's like this:
>
> msgstr "Insert ADEBIAN CDROM"
>
> which would be run through some sort of preprocessor, that would create
> a file with things like
>
> msgstr "Insert a Debian CDROM"
>
> for Debian, or (with some reconfiguration)
>
> msgstr "Insert an Ubuntu CDROM"
>
> for Ubuntu. It would require having an en.po to function properly, but
> that shouldn't be a problem; and this would move the problem to having
> correct .po files. This would need some coordination with the different
> translators, but I do think it could be done.
Yeah, I'd been thinking along pretty similar lines at one point. I'm
concerned about the complexity in some strongly-declined languages,
though (imagine ${DISTRO_ABLATIVE_ABSOLUTE}) and I'm concerned that it
puts a lot of the burden on translators when with a bit of investigation
we might find that it isn't really necessary.
Plus, a derivative distribution then still has to figure out the forms
of its name in a bunch of languages and fill those all into some kind of
master .po file, and I can say from experience that trying to figure
that out in the first place is a sucky job. Only distributions with
enormous popularity and thus users who get involved and speak most of
those languages between them, or those with developers who have the
opportunity to hang out with Debian translators, are likely to get very
far at all, and the rest have to live with fuzzy or incorrect
translations many of which are on the main installation path. If we can
do better than that so that people can produce a reasonably well-branded
installer with only a small amount of effort, I'd like to try.
It may be that we need a combination of these approaches to get all the
way there.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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