Re: General question about and request to translate Canadian and British English of "backintime" package
(Let me know if you don't want the Cc)
c.buhtz@posteo.jp wrote:
> I'm member of the upstream maintenance team of Back In Time [1] a
> rsync-based backup software also present in Debian's repository [2].
>
> The project is quit old and somehow we do have Canadian and British English
> as translation [3], but only 21% and 42% complete (just a little more then
> 300 short strings).
> My first impulse is to remove those variants of English because they are
> quit similar to US English which is used as default/source language in that
> project. But I'm not deep enough into that languages to understand their
> differences.
Looking at Weblate, I don't see much need for separate en_US and
other varieties - in fact the only word I can see where I'd expect
them to be different is "Finalizing" (usually "-ising" in British
English).
However, I do see quite a bit of bad English in the original en_US
versions - for instance...
At common/config.py:108
"When drive get connected (udev)"
That should that be "gets" to match the singular subject.
At common/config.py:358
"You must select at least one folder to backup!"
The noun is "backup", one word; but the verb is "to back up" (the same
applies for "breakdown", "login", "lookup", "setup", "shutdown", etc.)
At common/snapshots.py:749
"Can't find snapshots folder.\n"
"If it is on a removable drive please plug it."
The en_GB version you've already got fixes a grammatical error:
"If it is on a removable drive, please plug it in."
At common/snapshots.py:788
"Failed to take snapshot %s !!!"
In anglophone typography, exclamation marks never have a leading
space, so this should be
"Failed to take snapshot %s!!!"
(Or fewer exclamation marks would work equally well...)
> But maybe someone here would like to check the existing and complete the
> translation of these two English variants? Beside I can offer thous to my
> users I'm able to compare them and learn more about their difference. It
> would be great if someone would give it a try [3].
It seems to me that they're almost entirely unnecessary. If I get
time I'd like to go through all the original .py files suggesting
changes in the original message texts, but this may require all the
translations to be "unfuzzied" afterwards.
> Please let us know if you would like to be named as translator in the
> credits (e.g. about dialog) of the software.
No need, even if it's enough to be copyrightable.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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