Re: [RANT] French translation for debconf templates stucked at 90% : analysis

[Nicolas Bertolissio <nico.bertol-no-spam@free.fr>]

Le jeudi  1 juillet 2004, Miles Bader écrit :
> Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
> > "My computer" is translated into "mai konpyûta",
> > "My documents" into "mai dokyumento"
> > There are ways to translate "My" in japanese, and ways to translate
> > "documents" as well. IMHO, "mai konpyûta" (especially the "mai" part)
> > and "mai dokyumento" don't make any sense for most of the japanese
> > people.
> 
> They are just labels, which people learn the meaning of in context.
> For error messages, this wouldn't be so good, but for this usage, it's fine.

Sorry, I don't agree.

These are label but have no meaning for a non-english speaker, so they
have to be translated.  This is at least the way we do things in French.
For an english speaker this is a label with a meaning, so we try to find
French words to express the same idea so someone who has never used a
computer can understand what it is without having to learn the original
version, to try to make it's own understanding of it and to mentally
translated it each time it encounter these words.

When I read French articles in magazines with untranslated "kernel",
"driver", "device" and so on words, I have to translated them in French
mentally so I would prefer to read the whole article in English, or in
French but not with thoses mixed things.

Regards


Nicolas Bertolissio
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