Re: About dpkg translation, please consider i18n when choosing words
> I agree with you on that, but I would like to remind you
> that the message-ids technically are POSIX/C and not
> English.
That is a wrong assumption; the template could be in Spanish,
Romanian, or Dutch, it does not matter
OTOH, POSIX/C is _not_ a language, but a standard. And we are talking
here about messages that happend to be templates and _should_ be in
"good clear English, as Scott said.
> > I do not believe that this should be sacrificed for the
> > sake of making it easier for non-English speakers --
> > that's what the entire i18n effort is for, providing those
> > people with their own native language version.
>
> No. But if translators don't understand the message-ids, it
I do think that some of the messages will be hard to understand, even
by a native English speaker.
I dare you, Scott, to take 5 of your non-techie friends and ask them
to tell you what they understand from any random (obscure) 10 strings
(as I saw that frequently encountered ones are more polished) from
dpkg and see if they understand them. I bet that you will be
surprised.
Anyway, no need to argue here; I will try to modify the dpkg source
and add automatic comments, so the quality of the messages in dpkg
improves.
> > So in effect, I agree that "X is not a clear English
> > message" is a valid bug; and I agree that "this string is
> > incomplete, and not translatable" is a valid bug (cf.
> > "unable to %s"); but I do not agree that "I can't
> > translate this because I don't understand the English" is
> > a bug -- that's what dictionaries are for.
I agree with all of your statements above; (I wonder if you can find
any message that fit the last type in the ones I sent)
> > Correct, it's a syscall. This error is reporting the
> > failure of a syscall, so has to use the name of the
> > syscall that failed, obviously.
>
> In the version whoever will try to fix the error gets, yes.
> In the version the user gets, no. System calls don't mean
I guess Jacob's answer is quite relevant in the point we (translators)
want to make.
--
Regards,
EddyP
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge" A.Einstein
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