Re: [RANT] French translation for debconf templates stucked at 90% : analysis
martin.quinson@free.fr schrieb:
Selon Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de>:
Being a German native speaker, I write everything in English.
Same here.
Occasionaly, some other German native speaker decides to translate my
work to German.
In my case I could do myself. The reason to give a German translation
low priority are: The english original should be top quality first. The
package is addressed to admins.
Usually, I am not impressed by the translations because they usually
feel clumsy and awkward to me, as if I were explaining the things to a
child.
Keep it simple, is a good decision. But I think, I know what you mean.
Strangely, most German translations of commercial software
doesn't sound that clumsy
This depends. 25 years ago I was shocked by Siemens manuals in German
language.
I dunno about the german version, but the french version often sounds far more
professionnal to me than the english one.
Hmm ... my experience is, that English is more straight ahead and
shorter than German. Having only basic knowledge of French, it seems
IMHO more complicated than German to express technical things. If your
French version is more professional, than the English one must be of
very bad quality.
Correct grammar, no familiarity
(personalisation of the computer) and such are a real improvement, IMHO.
Besides the usual checklist (grammar, spelling, unique style, short
sentences) the most important thing is wording consistancy. IMHO this
should be done in the original version first, and then issue a "ready to
translate" message.
I'd like to know whether I am the only one who feels uncomfortable
with technical software in the native language.
Using only English has a lot of advantages. Just paste an error message
to google and you will find a solution for the problem.
But as you can see from translation activity, other people do not have
the same opinion, e.g. Brazilians or Japanese. There is a strong need
for translation, and this should be supported in the best way.
Erm. I can understand you don't personnaly want to use the translated version to
your native language, but I do think that using a not translated
system/software is simply not an option for some people.
ACK. The ideal solution is, that everybody can change the language at
runtime, e.g. via hotkey. Hard to implement, and overkill in most cases
- I know.
So, the whole debate here seems to come down to whether we want to provide a
system for hackers or for [lamda] users.
Or if debian targets only to experts, or also to beginners. I vote for
the beginners. Nobody can be expert in everything.
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
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