Re: Manpages translation
On Wed, 05 Mar 2003, Denis Barbier wrote:
> I strongly disagree, you are asking too much, translators can't
Like hell I am. I've been there and done that, for 3 years, and I had to
not only learn to read C code, but also get involved into crypto (so as to
learn how to translate the proper technical terms) to get the job right.
And I *do* think we are better off with something untranslated than
something with crappy l10n.
> - follow Debian dedicated ML
No.
> - subscribe to the PTS
No, if the DDTS already tells them when they are to update something. And
if it doesn't, it certainly could.
> - download and read the sources
> for all their packages.
YES. Every time something isn't 100% clear they ARE to READ the source, and
find out exactly what the sentence means, so as to translate it right.
Or do you expect me to hold translators to a lesser level of responsability
and technical excelence than the rest of the people involved [with
Debian/GNU/whatever]? Sorry, but I refuse to. I will not insult those
translators who do high-quality work, by holding their peers to low
standards.
> Consider a French translator who finds an error in sylpheed/fr.po.
> He runs
> $ apt-get source sylpheed
> but there is no po/ directory. Too bad, its maintainer is using his own
> f*cking packaging system so that only geeks can work on it (and of
> course in this case the fr.po file is patched!).
Well, that's something different.
For this case, the translator does a dpkg-buildpackage, and goes poke at the
unpacked and compiled source (he is quite welcome to ^C the build, the
sources will have been unpacked by then).
It is also perfectly workable to start requiring in policy a debian/whatever
doc that tells one how to unpack, and where the source in its final
(pre-build) format will be found. But no translator ever asked for this
seriously to the point of proposing the policy changes.
> I want a system similar to the Free Translation Project used for years
> by GNU folks: developers send PO files to a mail server, which sends
> them to each language list. Then translators update them and send them
> back to the robot which forwards them to developers.
And you get half-assed, often completely wrong translations a-plenty, to the
point that people who knows enough english (like me) end up doing a
LC_MESSAGES=en_US (or C) to get something they can understand back from a
program. Even if by doing that I have to forsake my own mother language
(that happens to be MUCH better than English as far as I am concerned), so
that I can get some work done.
Oh, there *ARE* a lot of very good translators that don't just pretend they
understand something, and actually go to the pain of clearing up any doubts
they have (by asking the code developer, or looking at the source). But
there are also a huge lot of them who don't. I know quite a few from the
pt_BR "l10n scene".
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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