Re: Translatable software names in package descriptions synopsis
Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> recently I filed a bug on a package description and - as usual -
> got a comment from debian-l10n-english.
>> Now, I can see how a synopsis that does double duty as a description
>> of the software and an explanation of its abbreviated name is going to
>> make life difficult for translators, but that's not enough of a reason
>> to prohibit it in the original English. Just translate it as a pure
>> explanation, without any extra uppercase, and demote the why-the-name
>> hint into the long description. …
>
> Perhaps this should pop up somewhere in the translators'
> guide(lines)? Did I miss some hint? How do the non-German
> translations teams handle this problem?
I should clarify that this is just my opinion, and I don't even count
as a translator.
In case it isn't clear, I was talking about a description where the
synopsis is an expansion of the packagename. For instance, if there
was a threaded USENET client called "yarn", it might get a short
description that just says "Yet Another ReadNews". The capitalisation
(otherwise discouraged in synopses) helps readers spot the "inlined"
why-the-name hint.
This is of course a minor problem for translators, who can't expect to
be able to fit both the name-expansion and the translation into the
synopsis, and need to find a way of reorganising the information.
Occasionally it happens the other way around: this year d-l-e has seen
packages named "rheolef" and "biomaj", both of which have names that
might be conveniently explained for francophones by expanding their
names, but it's not worth trying to fit that information into the
English version.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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