Re: About dpkg translation, please consider i18n when choosing words
On Sel, Juni 14, 2005 12:28, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 03:37 +0300, Eddy Petrisor wrote:
>
>
>> I agree with Konstantinos on this issue (and his proposal) and I would
>> like to add a few other remarks that I gathered during the painful
>> translation of dpkg before sarge's release:
>>
> At the disk of being confrontational, I actually don't agree with either
> of you. I think it's important that the English messages in dpkg be good,
> clear English. 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.
I agree with Scott at this point. As the disk space is limited, we should use
as short messages as possible. However, in many aspects I also agree with
Konstantinos, Eddy, and Clytie. The English messages should be made as clear
as possible for the translators. If it is not possible, give some brief
explanations about the strings.
> On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 20:40 +0300, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:
>
>
>> gobble replaced file `%.255s'
>>
>> I find the word 'gobble' highly untranslatable, at least not without
>> choosing a synonym.
>>
> I would agree that the position of that translation is difficult, but
> that's a side-effect of the current internal API of dpkg which I do not think
> was ever designed with translatable strings in mind.
Hmmmmm....... I encounter many words when translating dpkg or other packages.
Even worst, I couldn't find any synonym in my local language for those
strings.
The quick and dirty solution I've done so far is to left the strings as is.
However, when the translations become complete and I run it with my own
language, I suddenly asking my self " Damn, This translation is bad. Too many
foreign strings there. Is it really an Indonesian translation?" :(
I'm not native speaker and cannot understand all words. Of course, I've
dictionaries, but in some place it won't help so much. Hence, at least a brief
explanation of what those string/word talking about is really helpfull.
>> can it get more cyptical than this? dpkg, string 241 (main/configure.c:175)
>> "unable to stat new dist conffile `%.250s'"
>>
>>
>> What the hell am I supposed to understand from this?
>> Can you please full _English_ words?
>> stat is not a verb
>>
> 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.
>
>> dist is not a substantive
>>
> yes, this word is not useful.
>
>> conffile is not a substantive.
>>
> conffile is a (dpkg) jargon term used to describe a particular type of
> configuration file; again, as this message is reporting a failure, clarity of
> problem is more important.
>
> So this message is telling you that the stat() syscall on a conffile
> (something in DEBIAN/conffiles) failed.
Why this explanation is not included in the pot file. IMHO, it can help us,
the translators (at least me), to choose our local word to translate it.
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