On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 06:57:45AM +0200, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto wrote: (...) > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2003/debian-l10n-french-200305/msg00121.html > > The first post to the mailing list is the result of the only mail in which > i was asking Michael Bramer how to behave in the situation in which > translators do not respect the layout of the original description. IMHO this should have been discussed in the debian-i18n first. (...) > > It is time to go back to the Apache description. Maintainers are > > unhappy with the French translation provided by the DDTP. > > Yes we are since in the first place we asked nicely to change the layout > back to the original one (as it was before this translation) and then you (..) Maintainers or developers do not have a say on how translations are done except for gettext sintax errors. If you do not like how a translation team works, but you do not understand the language, tough luck. > > There is a comma separated list of items in English, and an itemized > > list in French. > > The point is that from a typographical point of view (in French) the > > preferred format for a long list of items is an itemized list; a comma > > separated list is considered as bad looking, this is certainly why > > the translator chose this format. I do not know English rules about > > this issue, and thus cannot tell if original description is right > > or not. > > you already received an answer to this here: > http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2003/debian-l10n-french-200305/msg00140.html (...) And he answered you back. The layout of the french description was changed because it _did_not_ fit French typographical rules. The first translator made a mistake (quite usual since people translating don't always know their own language's rules) and it was fixed later on by fixing the layout (4 months later?) Makes sense to me. > > Now Apache maintainers are telling us that they chose another layout > > and we are bound to it. > > Yes because the official maintainer is responsable for the description of > a package. Including the layout and this was told already in the same > message above. The official maintainer is in _no_ way responsible for the _translated_ description of a package. Please, let translation teams do their work without interfeering. > > File a wishlist bug as you were told already: > > http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting DDTP is not handled by BTS bugs. > There are policies for description. DDTP as developers have to respect > them. but i guess it is not your case since according to your post you do > not contribute to any of them. > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2003/debian-l10n-french-200305/msg00166.html First, thanks to Denis work, projects like DDTP are possible. Without his po-debconf half of the DDTP would be unmanagable. Please take time to know who you are you talking with. Second, there are no policies for translations. DDTP translators have to respect the views of their language translation team, not of the maintainer. If you wish to change that view, join the translation team, do not impose the changes "upstream" (from the developer side). If you do not read the language or understand it then, at most, you can send a mail to the Debian translation coordinator [1] > Why do you think we did ask kindly to have the french layout alligned with > all the others? and we did not changed it ourself? Because we did not want > to change the contents of the description even for a typo but having its > layout alligned with the others. > They don't have to! Content and layout in a translation is part of what the translator has to do. If there are typographical rules that make necessary a layout change a translator has to apply them! Saying otherwise is like saying that I have to keep, in Spanish, the same sentences as constructed in English when, frequently, a sentence in Spanish is longer than in English and I can group information in the translation. I completely agree with Denis that developers or upstreams should not interfere at all with the translation work, much less make changes to translated files (unless trivial, and even then they should be notified). Otherwise it makes it impossible for translators work in a constant translate and review process parallel to the work done upstream (and broken if somebody removes fuzzy entries, modifies text or change gettext's XX.po in anyway) Regards Javi [1] There is really no such position in Debian for all languages, but you can take the web translation list at www.debian.org/devel/website/translation_coordinators or try to find them in www.debian.org/international
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